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Our Cosmic Connections Activity - Task Description

Scenario:
While you were absent from school with the flu, you missed the day you were presenting your project on stellar evolution in Earth Science class. In two days your class going on a field trip to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and the principal has decided that students can not go on the field trip if they are missing any classroom assignments.

Your teacher agrees to let you present your project to the class the following morning. The project consists of an oral presentation, and an organized portfolio of supporting materials. The presentation and portfolio is 20% of your grade for the quarter. Before you got the flu, you had searched the internet and downloaded several images representing the different stages of evolution for mid-sized and massive stars, and written a brief description for each image on index cards. All you need to do is review the images and descriptions. When you get home, you spread the materials out on the dining room table, and spend several hours arranging the images into different sequences and matching the images to the descriptions to prepare for your presentation. You decide that you will leave everything on the table and get up early to review the images and descriptions one last time. You stack the images and the descriptions in two separate piles, both in the order that you will present the evolutionary stages for the different mass stars from formation in a stellar nursery to their final end products.

The next morning you go downstairs for your final review. You are completely shocked! You cannot believe the mess on the table! Your new puppy had jumped onto the table during the night, knocked the stack of images onto the floor, and chewed and mangled the index cards with the descriptions.

Task:
There is no way you can tell your teacher that "the dog ate my presentation!" Fortunately the puppy did not chew the images. You only have one hour to reorganize the images into an appropriate sequence and write a brief description for each one.


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