CSM is one the few sites in the San Francisco Bay Area offering community, K-12, and higher education programs in a planetarium setting. Serving thousands of residents and students since 1963, CSM now maintains the only operating (though aging!) planetarium on the Bay Area Peninsula. Its neighbor, the renowned California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, is closed for renovation until 2008. CSM’s proposed new planetarium will serve an important community need as it replaces a facility nearly 50 years old.
Today CSM’s astronomy program stress hands-on investigative approaches to learning. Each year, more than 500 students enroll in transfer-level astronomy classes, part of a rich program of science education that promotes investigative, hands-on approaches to learning science. (For more information about CSM’s astronomy program log on to http://www.collegeofsanmateo.edu/astronomy/program)
Held today in CSM’s “old” planetarium, Project Star Gaze invites students and their teachers, usually kindergarten through fifth grades, to hands-on events. Presentations by CSM astronomy faculty include a sky show and displays with spectrum tubes and diffraction grating glasses to illustrate how astronomers measure star composition. More than 600 students have visited CSM in 2004 alone. This project is generously supported by Chevron Energy Solutions, the San Mateo County Community Colleges Foundation, and the San Mateo County Astronomical Society. (For more information about CSM’s Project Star Gaze program log on to http://www.collegeofsanmateo.edu/astronomy/program/Star_gaze.htm)
Home to the San Mateo County Astronomical Society, CSM has hosted dozens of star parties and astronomy day events bringing thousands of visitors to the planetarium. Star parties have celebrated meteor showers in 2001, a lunar eclipse in May 2003, and also in August 2003 Mars’ closest approach to Earth in 60,000 years, for example. Visiting astronomers providing public forum talks have included scientists from NASA Ames, the SETI Institute, University of California at Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.
CSM is also home for the Integrated Science Center (founded in 1996), a specialized laboratory facility that is a physical site for students’ investigative, hands-on learning activities and a focal point for science faculty from various areas of science to research and develop curriculum. Students from anatomy, biology, botany, chemistry, geology, physics and engineering, among other fields, work on cross-disciplinary, investigative approaches to science. The Integrated Science Center has been an acknowledged leader in community college science education. As such it has received several grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as part of its effort to promote reform in science education. (The new science building will include a facility dedicated to the Center.)
In 1996 CSM became a member college of the Mathematics and Science Teacher Education Program (MASTEP), one of 16 regional sites funded by National Science Foundation to be centers of excellence for the education of science and math teachers (In addition to CSM, member institutions include City College of San Francisco, Evergreen Valley College, San Francisco State University, San Jose City College, and San Jose State University.)
While major funding for MASTEP by NSF ended in 2002, MASTEP continues many activities through 2005 with limited NSF funding. MASTEP’s major areas of focus has included the early-start recruitment and mentoring of future teachers of science and math as well as curricula reform consistent with recommendations of the Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993) and the National Research Council’s (NRC) National Science Education Standards (1996).
