Celestial navigation for high school students

Abstract

There is a felt need among many high school students and educators for special interest topics. A syllabus was written, designed to teach the students how to determine a position by celestial means. This is a topic which is not commonly taught in the high schools. It is not included in the approved science textbooks nor in the approved curricula. This syllabus was intended to augment existing curricula and be a topic for special interest groups. It was not designed as a semester-long course in itself. The syllabus was written as a fourteen-lesson course. It included the basic concepts and definitions of celestial navigation, operating procedures for the sextant, computational procedure for a solar sighting, star identification, computational procedures for stellar sightings and plotting. The syllabus capitalized on the use of a scientific apparatus, the sextant, which was introduced very early in the course. This feature captivated the interest of the student and held that interest through the following theory lessons. Each lesson was preceded by the specific objectives and succeeded by a review. The objectives were written in behavioral terms. The reviews were of the programmed instruction type or a problem, depending upon the material in the lesson. ...