Introductory astronomy survey courses for non-science majors (”Astro 101”) reach an estimated 250,000 students per year (Prather et al., 2009). This course is regarded as an important (and often last) way of improving quantitative and scientific reasoning in 10% of U. S. college graduates.
Astronomical ideas are challenging for introductory students to grasp at a conceptual level, even when using a variety of active learning techniques (French and Prather, 2020). Many of the more-challenging concepts revolve around the dynamical and temporal evolution of astronomical concepts like lunar phases, transiting planets, and cosmology. Yet these concepts are typically illustrated in Astro 101 classrooms using static images. Instructors should use demonstrations, videos, simulations, and other dynamic media to significantly improve conceptual understanding of time-varying astronomical concepts. Within this gap, we propose to focus on animated gifs as the lowest common denominator for non-static images in the world today. They are ubiquitous on the internet, easy to place into lecture slides, and ideal for the coming generation of online textbooks. They can even be embedded in PDFs, although this is not yet common. The format is stable, small, long-lived, and easy to create. Animated gifs also transcend language, making them instantly accessible to the whole world, especially when coupled with descriptive “alt-text” for the blind and visually impaired community.
An informal poll of BYU students unsurprisingly found that 100% of students think that animations are more impactful and/or lead to better learning than static images. Detailed studies (e.g., Ploetzner et al., 2021) on the use of instructional animations show that they are generally effective, but there are design principles that are important to consider both in the creation and instructional implementation of an animation. There is evidence to support the idea that animations particularly benefit learning by women Coward et al. (2012). PI Ragozzine hired a TA to scour Wikipedia/Wikimedia for astronomy animations to produce and she only found 23 that were better than 7/10 for pedagogical value. With the high educational potential of animated gifs, the lack of existing resources, and the passion of PI Ragozzine for this project, we motivate: Broader Impacts Objective 3 (BI-O3): Develop and populate the Astronomy Animated Gif Library (AAGL) with a goal of 10 million animations viewed. We propose to create 100 new animations covering all topics in introductory astronomy with a focus on conceptual understanding. These animations will be carefully planned for pedagogical value motivated by specific learning outcomes, following best practices (e.g. Ploetzner et al., 2021; French and Prather, 2020). They will be high-quality, informative, aesthetically-pleasing, open-source, and freely-shareable (under a CC-BY-4.0 license, see 19 the Data Management Plan). They will be piloted in BYU astronomy courses (and possibly elsewhere) with feedback will be used to improve the animations and their pedagogical value. The AAGL will be a GitHub-based webpage that gathers, indexes, and organizes all of these animated gifs and makes them freely available thanks to NSF support. GitHub also enables others to contribute their own high-quality animations (through Pull Requests) and for long-term maintenance by a community beyond the funding of this proposal. Most of our animated gifs will be created using straightforward python codes that will also be shared as part of the AAGL so that advanced users will be able to modify these to suit their specific educational needs. These will use consistent themes and color schemes (e.g., gravitational forces always represented by green arrows) to strengthen understanding across topics. Development, management, and advertising of AAGL will be significantly supported by a dedicated undergraduate students likely taken from BYU’s award-winning physics teaching and computer animation programs.
We will encourage multiple educational uses for the animated gifs that are part of AAGL: uploading to Wikimedia Commons for use in astronomy-themed Wikipedia pages; used in BYU’s Astronomy classes; and used by dozens of Astro 101 instructors after advertising AAGL at conferences, on email lists, etc. We are particularly excited to be partnering with the OpenStax Astronomy free online open-source textbook (see Letters of Collaboration). Astronomy is reported to be used in more than 1000 astronomy classrooms by about 80,000 students per year. Despite its online nature, all images are currently static, though there are links to videos and applets. We are in discussions with OpenStax on incorporating our animated gifs directly into the online version textbook. Our animations and associated lecture slides would be placed in the adjacent Open Education Resources Commons Hub. We will measure success by estimating the number of times our animations are used for instruction, with a goal of providing 10,000,000 views by the end of the funding period. Using Wikipedia pageviews, major astronomy topics alone are visited millions of times per year. Use in OpenStax Astronomy could readily result in a million views per year. We expect use at BYU alone to reach half a million years. Adoption by even 3% of Astro 101 instructors could easily lead to another few million views. Although we will not be able to quantitatively measure the extent of AAGL beyond BYU and OpenStax online, using Wikipedia pageviews, OpenStax tracking, and AAGL download statistics, we can estimate the impact of the AAGL. We look forward to over 10,000,000 ”Aha!” moments enabled through animation of astronomical concepts.