The Dark Universe - Exercises and Proceedings from the German-Italian WE Heraeus Summer School held in 2017 in Heidelberg

TL;DR

This paper presents educational exercises and classroom materials developed during a summer school aimed at training teachers and students in astronomy topics like supernova cosmology and the cosmic microwave background.

Contribution

It introduces new teaching materials and tutorials designed for high-school and teacher training, focusing on key cosmological concepts.

Findings

Materials suitable for high-school teaching

Tutorials for teacher training

Coverage of four main astronomy topics

Abstract

The Heraeus Summer School series "Astronomy from four perspectives", funded by the WE Heraeus Foundation, draws together teachers and teacher students, astronomers, physicists and astronomy students from Germany and Italy. For each summer school, participants gather at one of the four participating nodes: Heidelberg, Padua, Jena, and Florence. The main goal of the series is to bring astronomy into schools, which is achieved by educating and training the teachers and teacher students. In this e-print, we present the exercises, tutorials, and high-school classroom materials developed during the fifth summer school of the series, which took place at Haus der Astronomie in Heidelberg August 26 -- September 2, 2017. "The tutorials" were prepared beforehand for the participants of the Summer schools, and are suitable for use in teacher training. "Classroom materials" were developed mainly during the summer school itself, and are suitable for high-school level teaching. They include question sheets for pupils, and some pointers on where to use the material in the German high school curriculum. Both sets of materials address the summer school's four main topics: Supernova cosmology, the virial theorem, rotation curves of galaxies, and the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).