This talk presents activities for teaching big bang cosmology to 14-15 year old students in their last compulsory year of science. It includes simple, novel activities and games designed for exploring cosmology from the first nanosecond to the present era. Examples include matter-antimatter annihilation card games for exploring the physics of the first nanoseconds; novel simulations for structure formation; magnetic tennis balls for quantitative experiments on binding energy and logarithmic games and activities for understanding the enormous range of scales needed to describe the universe. The program is under trial in schools and workshops have been held with a large group of teachers. We will present the learning sequence, novel activities and report preliminary results from the trials.

Biography:

I am a PhD student at the Einstein-First project at UWA, working on developing a Big Bang Cosmology module for Year 10. I have completed my master's from Tribhuwan University. I am interested in modernising school science.