The Use of Role-Playing Exercises in Teaching Undergraduate Astronomy and Physics

Paul J. Francis, Aidan P. Byrne, PASA, 16 (2), in press.

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Other Role-Playing Exercises

We have run role-playing exercises in a variety of other classes. In this section we summarise these exercises, and the lessons learned from them not covered above. Notes for these exercises are also available in the electronic edition of this paper.

Collaborative Role-Play: Run-Away Greenhouse Exercise

The aim of this exercise was to teach first year astronomy students, with no maths and physics background, about the greenhouse effect. Once again, students were asked to play the roles of experts at an astronomy conference. The topic of the conference was the `Mystery of Venus': why conditions on Venus are so different from those on Earth, when the masses, radii and distances from the sun of the two planets are so similar. The subject matter was divided into four sections, covering atmospheric absorption, surface out-gassing, radiation flow etc.

As an experiment, this exercise was run as a collaborative role-play rather than a competitive one. Instead of each group sharing one field of expertise (one briefing paper), each group had four members, and the four members would each have one of the four briefing papers. Thus there was no need for groups to interact with other groups: they could work things out collaboratively amongst themselves to win the game.

A second innovation was to set intermediate questions. After the exercise had been running for about 10 minutes, an intermediate question (`how does the atmospheric composition of an Earth-like planet change as you raise its temperature?') was posed on the blackboard, and each group had to take a vote. This was repeated with a second question (`what should you add to a planet's atmosphere to raise its temperature?') five minutes later. The aim of these questions was to keep the discussion on track.

This exercise ran much faster than the case-study in Section 3, and essentially all groups got the correct answer within 30 minutes. Unfortunately, many students achieved this rapid success by not fully thinking through the issues: groups would quickly work out a `sort-of-all-right' answer and then stop. The interaction between groups in the competitive exercise seemed to prevent this, leading to a deeper engagement with the material.

Third-year Nuclear Physics: Nuclear ConfigurationExercise

This exercise was stimulated by the successful implementation of the exercises in astrophysics. The class in this case was a mainstream physics class at the third year level with 19 students participating. The required aim was to establish the energy levels, angular momentum and configurations in a nucleus which has three valence particles. The approach and subdivision of tasks was similar to that in the case study (6 distinct briefing papers). The problem was a difficult one, and significantly above what had usually been presented to the class in previous years. Some aspects of the exercise had been presented earlier in the lecture course: for example the students were aware of the shell model energy levels, collective excitations and gamma-ray multipolarities and their relationship to the angular momentum of levels. The students had not previously been exposed to the situation where the states in a nucleus involve the coupling of more than two active particles. The exercise was primarily one of integration, requiring all aspects to be incorporated in order to achieve the correct solution. Based on the experience with the earlier exercises, fewer `red herrings' were included and the students were expected to complete the exercise as an assignment and asked to present the final solution a week later.

The student responses for this task mirrored those of the case study. The majority of students completed about 3/4 of the exercise in class, with almost all presenting the correct solution at the end. Pleasingly several students presented particularly insightful responses and even the slower students demonstrated a good grasp of the principles.

All students thought the exercise worthwhile and the formal student questionnaire responses at the end of the unit were highly favourable.

The adaptation of the approach was not particularly onerous, with the most challenging aspect being balancing the level of difficulty in each of the briefing papers. This is compounded by the fact that the information required to solve the problem completely (that is to work out the configurations at high energy and angular momentum) required information which was of little use to solving the rest of the problem.

Postgraduate Winter School: Galaxy Formation Exercise

This exercise was run at the 1998 Harley Wood Winter School (an annual meeting of Australian astronomy graduate students from around the country). The topic of the meeting was galaxy formation and evolution, and around 40 students attended. The role-playing exercise was designed to teach the students about current research on high redshift galaxies, and about the next generation of telescopes and satellites being planned to study them.

Students were assigned to teams of three, each team chosen by the student organisers to mix more- and less-experienced students, and students from different institutions (thus serving a secondary function as a social mixer). Each team was given briefing sheets describing a particular proposed instrument, and the science goals (in the study of the high redshift universe) it can address. The students were told that they were an IAU meeting charged with deciding which instruments should be funded. The exercise was run in two one-hour slots: one at the start of the winter school, and one at the end.

Rather than have the lecturer chair the `meeting', one group of students were appointed as chairs of the IAU meeting. They were given a briefing paper about management techniques, and asked to work out some way of getting a consensus from the meeting.

The students tried a variety of approaches: they wandered around trying to set up consortia, and trying to persuade other teams of the superiority of their techniques, while members of the chairing team tried to identify a consensus, or at least some proposals that could be put to a vote. In the end, the chairing group decided to get each team to give a two-minute presentation, and then a vote was taken, with each team allowed three votes, to ensure that each team did not just vote for their own proposal.

The exercise worked very well, and was described by most participants as the highlight of the winter school. Several students revealed unexpected presentation, negotiation and management skills. The only problem was a tendency to focus on the instrument projects rather than the science. This, of course, never happens in the real world...


Next Section: Summary
Title/Abstract Page: The Use of Role-Playing
Previous Section: Case Study: Solar System
Contents Page: Volume 16, Number 2

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