Your Poster (to be presented Dec. 18th)

Your poster will communicate your web-based, book-based, or activity-based research on a burning question you and a classmate or two have on some space science topic.

You will work with another person or two on this poster.

You need to give yourself enough time to

• find your burning question and your partner(s), (Sept)
• learn about the topic, (Oct)
• research the topic through reading about it on the web, reading about it in books, and/or doing some experiment or activity, (Oct)
• write the text, (Nov)
• create or find appropriate graphics, (Nov)
• and assemble the poster. (Dec)

Posters Details:

• We will determine the size of the poster later in the course
• Each poster should have:
• A title with an author list (you and the others working on the poster)
• An introduction, which is a brief explanation of the poster including the question being researched
• A section or two on the topic you are describing or results you have found
• A conclusion and/or summary section
• Posters should use large enough font (hand-written or printed) such that a person can easily read what has been written.
• Graphics and text should be used to explain the ideas you are expressing in your poster. Drawings or graphics can be used to help explain a concept. If you are reporting on an experiment you have done, you can use graphs to explain the results.  If you use pictures or graphs that have been created by someone else, please state where you found the graphic and who created it. 

WARNING: Do not use graphics from copyrighted material without the consent of the author

• Create your poster by printing text and imagery such as pictures, graphs, or diagrams on sheets of paper that can be placed up on a wall.  Don’t forget to give captions to your pictures, graphs, and diagrams.

Note: Communicating your ideas and personal discoveries is the most important goal. Sometimes making your poster artistic can help this goal.  There are several ideas for making your poster look nice, such as placing your sheets of paper on a colored construction paper background to highlight your text or imagery.  For other ideas, ask Greg or Laura or fellow classmates.

Poster Topics:

We will provide various ideas for your poster topic.  These suggestions can be found on the website, under Poster Ideas: http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/astro48bcc/poster.html

The topic of the poster should be at least loosely related to the topics addressed in class.  You could consider doing some kind of experiment at home related to the topic rather than just reporting more details on a particular space science topic.  For example, you could search for space data on the web and use that to support or negate an idea about space; or you could perform a mathematical calculation to support an idea that was stated in class; or you could set up an experiment with household items, take data, and report on your findings.  How much or what you do should be something that sounds fun and challenging to you and your class partner(s).

Poster Session:

The last day of class, Dec 18^th, we will have a poster session where you will present your posters to other students in the class, the teachers, and a group of the scientists who gave lectures.  All posters will hang on the walls around the room and you and your partner(s) will take turns standing at your poster to explain it to the other people in the room.  Others in the class who are not standing at a poster will be walking around looking at posters.  You will have a couple of people at a time who will listen to you explain your poster.  This is one way scientists relay their discoveries to their peers at conference.

“Advice on designing scientific posters” from Colin Purrington, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania:

A scientific poster is a large document that can communicate your research at a scientific meeting, and is composed of a short title, an introduction to your burning question, an overview of your trendy experimental approach, your amazing results, some insightful discussion of aforementioned results, a listing of previously published articles that are important to your research, and some brief acknowledgement of the tremendous assistance and financial support conned from others—if all text is kept to a minimum, a person could fully read your poster in under 10 minutes.