Cosmic chemistry with radioactive wrinkles

This unit is designed with the intention of enabling students with varying learning and expression styles to participate and evolve their understanding of chemistry, with an extension to cosmology. Students in cooperative groups will collaborate with their digitally native peers to strengthen their social interactions, expand their insights on research applications and tools and further develop their communication expression and presentation skills.  The purpose of this unit is to teach students about the connection between chemistry at the atomic scale and the significance of the concepts on a universal scale.

Through the process of understanding scientific vocabulary, students will be able to connect conceptual chemistry to access and explore chemistry’s history and existence in the universe.  The unit is constructed to empower students to ask their own questions using the standard who, why, what questioning approach and then deepen the inquiry using the Bloom’s taxonomy technique to steer their research and responses to the questions asked. This unit postures students to evaluate the conceptual connections between chemistry and cosmology and the time scales between life on earth and earth’s place in the cosmos.