The Astronomy Workshop: Instructor Support Materials and Student Activities for the Scientific Notation Tool

The Astronomy Workshop (http://janus.astro.umd.edu) is a collection of interactive World Wide Web tools that were developed under the direction of Doug Hamilton for use in undergraduate classes and by the general public. The philosophy of the site is to foster student interest in astronomy by exploiting their fascination with computers and the internet. We have upgraded the "Scientific Notation" tool in response to faculty feedback and input from student interviews. In addition to providing students practice in changing decimal numbers into scientific notation, they may now practice multiplication and division with numbers in scientific notation. We have added instructor materials and student quizzes to enhance the instructional use of the scientific notation web tools. This research was sponsored by NASA EPO grant NNG06GGF99G.