By Cindy J. Roth
You have 12 friends living on 12 stars thanks to the invention of heat-sensitive body suits. Most of them you have only telepathized with, and you know only the names of the stars they call home, not their exact addresses.
You need an ancient star chart developed roughly 400,000 years ago by people known as Greeks. You must use the primitive chart to plot the addresses with good, old-fashioned longitude and latitude lines.
For students at Merrick Avenue Middle School, such an assignment in years past might have kept them entrenched in textbooks for hours, but identifying stars in the sky has gone from a one-dimensional paper exercise to a three-dimensional learning experience. The school's new 15-foot-high, 20-foot-wide Teflon Starlab planetarium makes teaching astronomy and scientific theories come alive before their eyes.
Starlab "explains conceptual ideas you can't get on paper," said Eric Pellegrino, 31, a Merrick Avenue science teacher. "Educationally, it makes things real. How can you teach about stars in the classroom in the daytime? I can only show it on a piece of paper, unless I met with kids at night. But now in the middle of the day, I can show the night sky."
The $10,000 Starlab was a gift from the PTA. Caryn Frange, Merrick Avenue principal, said students and staff are "blown away" with it and cannot believe its similarities with a real planetarium. Frange said she had hoped to have an addition with a planetarium built onto the school, but the Starlab was more cost effective, requiring only a room with a high enough ceiling, the auditorium.
The planetarium takes about five minutes to inflate and deflate with an electric fan. To enter Starlab, students crawl through a 12-foot-long tunnel that leads into a large cell, which holds 30 students and several adults.
Eighth-grade student Tracy Gurock called Starlab awesome. Classmate Andrew Schwartz said it has helped him learn about the stars and how to find his way when lost. Having the stars appear all around makes them more lifelike than on flat paper, he said.
Science students aren't the only ones using Starlab. With a quick change of a cylinder, Starlab becomes a math classroom, allowing students to calculate angles throughout the galaxy. Starlab's zodiac cylinder helps students learn about Greek mythology, and English students recently went inside to write poems about what they saw.
Assistant Principal Teresa Grossane said Starlab cuts across most curriculum areas. Having taken part in several Starlab classes, Grossane said she has quickly learned so much.
Student learning has accelerated, as well. "Already, I see a difference with kids grasping the information," Pellegrino said.
