Sarah M. Hansen

Teaching & Outreach
I very much enjoy teaching, and have been involved with a variety of different education & outreach activities.

I am part of a team that plans and teaches astronomy-related labs for the after-school science club for elementary school students (STOMP) at North Kenwood/Oakland Charter School. More details about the activities we designed and taught can be found here. I was in St. Louis for the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) National Conference in 3/2007, presenting "An Ideal Lesson," a session on the kinetic theory of gasses, with Reid Sherman. The full set of labs presented by KICP people at this conference can be found here. I've taught labs for PhySci 119 (Stellar Astronomy and Astrophysics), PhySci 120 (The Origin of the Universe and How We Know) and NatSci 102 (Evolution of the Universe) at the University of Chicago. Geometry and the Fate of the Universe is a lab I developed that has been used several times in these classes. I developed and taught a year-long course about temperature and cosmology for middle- and high-school students from around the South Side of Chicago (the Space Explorers program). Students spent one quarter investigating how to measure temperaure with direct probes, and building & calibrating their own thermometers; they then spent one quarter learning about how to measure the temperature of remote objects (in particular, how to use astronomical imaging data to determine the temperature of stars); the year culminated with a quarter devoted to measuring the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background. I've also planned and taught several labs for Yerkes Summer and Winter Institutes, and developed a quarter-long seminar series for leadership students in Space Explorers. Fingerprinting the Stars, a lab on on using spectral information from stars to determine stellar temperatures that I designed for Yerkes Summer Institute 2004. Milky Way Model, a lab on mapping the positions of a wide variety of objects in the Galaxy, resulting in a beautiful walk-through distribution of astronomical images, that Rob Friedman & I designed for Yerkes Winter Institute 2006. States of Matter, a lab on investigating different states of matter and how pressure and temperature can instigate phase transitions that I developed for Yerkes Winter Institute 2003. I've been involved with the Astro-Science Workshop at The Adler Planetarium and the KICP's Cosmology Short Course Big Bang & Beyond, 21st Century Cosmology.