photo by Brent FleurySure, you could make your students sit inside working out formulas about falling objects. But why not challenge them to design their own "drop capsule," a vessel made from paper plates, newspaper, straws and rubber bands that will keep an egg from cracking when it’s dropped from a third-story window?

That’s just one example of the kind of experiment Judy Beck might run in her attempts to get students of all ages (and everybody else) interested in the laws of physics. At one time or another, we’ve all looked up in the sky and asked the biggest of questions: What’s out there? Where does the universe begin and end? Beck, a UNC-Asheville astronomy and physics lecturer, has made a career out of not only helping students seek the answers to those questions, but also guiding them in forming the questions in the first place. She specializes in something called "inquiry-based science education," which, according to Beck, basically means this: "Students use experience to construct their own knowledge. They come up with the questions."

Beck got interested in education and astronomy as an undergraduate at Williams College in Massachusetts, where she ran the planetarium shows for students and the public. Now she helps develop curriculum and teaches those who will become science educators as well as those who may never take another college science class.

Taking science out of the textbook and rooting it in a student’s own observations is central to what she does. Last year, she received a Rotary University International Teacher Grant to do astronomy outreach and curriculum reform in Chile, traveling to rural areas with an inflatable planetarium and introducing teachers, students and parents to astronomy for the first time. She does frequent outreach in local schools too, including helping organize Space Week at Vance Elementary and speaking at the Science Sisters afterschool program at the Colburn Earth Science Museum.

Learning about physics and astronomy is "a great way to expand the minds of students of any age," she says, and it improves problem-solving abilities even for those who don’t plan on entering the field. Looking at the universe as a system and as a whole is a mind game that helps us to see things from different perspectives and in different dimensions. "To understand sizes and distances that are almost incomprehensibly large, you have to study things that are almost incomprehensibly tiny," Beck says. "Like studying light spectra to understand the properties of stars and planets, for example, or the physical composition of the stars and planets." If that sounds mind-bogglingly conceptual, consider this: "Looking into the night sky is the only experience you can have where you’re actually looking backwards in time, because what we see now represents what existed light years ago," she says. "The further out you look, the further back in time you’re looking." It’s just that kind of truly cosmic thinking that keeps astronomy and physics fascinating for her. — Joanne O’Sullivan