Learning Adventure #3

The data and voice guy in the school district where I work showed me Celestia a year or two ago: he's always finding interesting applications that push the graphics capabilities of our Macs. My Mac at the time didn't do so well with the animation but the application moved along with the rest of my data to my new(er) Mac but I never gave a second thought to it. When Professor Stager told us to download Celestia I initially felt a little ahead of the curve because I had used the program before, but I did update it to the current version and with my newer Mac the animation is nice and smooth.

I have found that personally I had a little difficulty using the program at first in terms of navigating through the galaxy. I was able to find the Location: Go to Object and figured out that I could plug in different planets and Celestia would whisk me away to the reaches of the universe. I think to get the most out of the application that I would want to use one of the resources provided by my classmates and take a guided tour of various landmarks scattered throughout the galaxy. I figure so long as I have a towel with me there's no way I can run into too much trouble as I travel around the universe (I hope somebody gets that reference).

To further explore the question posed by Professor Stager, I decided to ask a student from Tech Club to play around with the software with me, on a separate laptop, and give me his reactions. I had already explained to him and the Tech Club about my work this year and had permission from his parents to use him in my research, so I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to work with a student and gauge his reactions to this software. I knew that he was interested in space and space travel as he had worked on the past three stop-motion Lego films made by Tech Club, all of which involved astronauts and tragedies in the depths of space. I provided him with a 14" iBook laptop, loaded with Celestia, and I sat down beside him with an identical iBook running Celestia as well. The student, who I will call Paul, had never used Celestia before but was excited about helping me explore the application.

Paul felt that it was difficult to figure out how to move in different directions at first. He started by using the Travel menu to go Faster and passed right through the Earth, which was in front of him. I pointed out the Velocity setting, so he was able to increase his speed to 1000 km/s and cover more ground. With my help he soon located the Location: Go to object and Location: Select to find different places and objects to explore. He stated that as he worked with the program it became easier for him to use.

The student immediately thought that the application would be perfect to use in "Mission to Earth," the Lego stop-motion film that he storyboarded at the beginning of the school year. He imagined using the program to generate the transitions between scenes when the aliens are traveling to Earth, for example. The "Capture Movie" feature is not available in this version, but third-party applications, such as Snapz ProX for the Mac (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/ ), could be used to capture a movie. The Celestia forum also states the Mac version will not capture movies, nor will the Linux version. I happen to own a copy of Snapz ProX, so we will definitely experiment with its use when we film "Mission to Earth" this winter.

Additionally, Paul felt that the program would come in handy studying for a "space test." He felt that the application would help him to figure out how the planet rotated, its orbit around the sun, and various longitudinal and latitudinal information about the planet.

It was fun and interesting to explore this program, both on my own and with Paul. The student was definitely much more hands-on than I was, preferring to jump right in, while I felt more need for a guided tour of some sort. Both ways the application was an entertaining and educational look at space, something we were both interested in.

Update 10-10-2006

Today I had Paul show Henry, another student, how to use Celestia. Henry is very much interested in computers and I am members of my cadre were interested in how the students would interact and instruct one another to use the software. Henry's self-perceived proficiency with computers sometimes can interfere with other students interacting with him. I explained to Henry and Jake that I was going to take some notes while they messed around with Celestia and maybe ask them some questions about its use. I asked Paul if he would show Henry how Celestia works.

Paul started by opening the application and explaining to Henry that you could use Celestia to travel to different planets. Paul sat at the keyboard and the mouse and Henry sat next to him observing. This time Paul was quite proficient at navigating around the solar system. He went to the Location menu and selected Go to Object. First he chose to visit Venus, then Mars. He also showed Henry how one could click on whatever was being viewed and drag it to adjust the view. Roll, pitch, and yaw could all be adjusted with the keypad, and Paul had fun spinning Earth upside down. At one point Paul also turned on the option to view orbits, which he found to be very interesting.

I asked Paul and Henry what besides planets could they look at, since Paul seemed mostly preoccupied with locating planets. Paul suggested stars and constellations, and took us to the Mily Way, which he identified as a blurry smudge that spread across the window. I asked Henry if he knew of any constellations: he suggested The Big Dipper. Paul looked it up at as he had done before and was not able to find it. I suggested using the Location: Select option, and we tried to track it down there without luck. So I suggested we use a computer to identify some of the stars that make up the Big Dipper. Using google we were able to find a page that had a diagram of Ursa Major, including the North Star, Polaris. We were then able to use Location: Select and track down Polaris.

When asked what he would use the software for, Henry had an immediate answer: use it to make movies, another one of his favorite hobbies. He said he could use scenes of traveling through space as clips in a movie, much like Paul had done. The graphics of the program are very enticing to young students.

After that Paul surrendered use of the mouse and keyboard and let Henry take over. Interestingly, and while my back was turned, Henry must have gone to the Celestia menu and realized that there was a demo mode that I had not noticed and started it running. Thus he started a non-interactive, but very interesting, tour of the capabilities of the software. Unfortunately, the recess bell rang and it was time to pry Henry off the computer and send him back to class.

It will be interesting to see if Henry or Paul chose to continue to play with the software. The idea of using Celestia as a component along with the iLife suite, something Gary Stager has been doing in school workshops, to produce travel brochures of distant planets is absolutely fascinating and enchanting. I can envision steering Henry, who is hungry for projects involving computers but whose specialist teacher says needs to be doing something other than "playing" with the computers, to a project such as this: he is already very well versed at using iLife, particularly GarageBand and iMovie. Perhaps using Snapz ProX to capture some footage of his planet he could put together a video travel brochure as an independent project? I look forward to monitoring the students continued interest in Celestia.