Week 8 Blog

    In the lab this week, we had six groups that shared their presentations over the different topics we were assigned. My group was the past, present, and future of space travel. For this, we went over the timeline of space travel that occurred during the space race, what our current science understanding is, the expected future, along with the Iowa connections to space travel. The main part that I feel is most relevant to what I have learned in this class so far is the misconceptions. The misconceptions we brought up were that the Earth is closer to the Sun in the summer, the solar system is very packed together, and that the Moon orbits the Earth once a day- which are all false. I have learned more about these misconceptions during our lectures and labs!

    What remained with me most from Thursday’s lecture was the Right Stuff/Wrong Gender slide. Women were more preferred to men because they were lighter, shorter, and consumed less food. I have never heard about this before, and it was fascinating for me to learn and I am curious as to why this has never been mentioned before. When it comes to learning about space travel, you really only learn about the male point of view from it and what the men have accomplished. You never hear about what the females were doing or accomplishing. This was eye opening to me during the lecture that made me reflect on my elementary learning about science. Makes me want to be a teacher that makes sure all perspectives are taught!

    The textbook reading this week goes over the different topics that were presented in the lab on Monday, so it was very refreshing to read more information over what we had previously discussed. The topics were Origins of the Universe, Origins of the Earth, Black Holes, Galaxies, and Stars. I feel what I found most interesting and helpful was the Origin of the Earth because this was the topic I learned most about during the lab as well. I used to think that the Earth was formed during the Big Bang, but that would not make sense because the Earth formed 4.65 billion years ago. The Big Bang occured 13.7 billion years ago, therefore, this would not have created the Earth. This was my biggest takeaway from the reading and the lab!