Jr. King College Bristol, Tennessee Middle school children are frequently motivated to learn science through their fascination with astronomy. Our current age of solar system exploration and the Hubble Space Telescope has strengthened its place in the curriculum. Astronomy simply captures the imagination like few other topics.
Students enroll with many different interests and majors.
This year the students were offered the option of taking a conventional final examination or creating and presenting planetarium shows to children. All 12 students enrolled opted for the planetarium shows. We rented the Starlab portable planetarium from the Johnson Country Middle School in Mountain City, Tennessee. Its 22-foot diameter plastic dome was inflated on the gymnasium floor at the college. This provided a completely dark environment in which to project images of constellations and the stars of night sky.