Hanging the planets in the Sun

The Olmi-Comics is a laboratory with a strong constructivist inspiration designed for the last year of lower secondary school.
While detailed instructions are usually provided to reproduce representations of the Solar System (SS), in our case the boys and girls are challenged to create a scale solar system without any specific indication, except a piece of string of unknown length and a purely numeric table showing the mean orbital rays (in a.u.) of the planets, including Cerere and Pluto. The students are provided with cards with the planets’ images and some pegs to hand them on the line.
The environment is informal: students can sit down on the floor and find the most appropriate set-up to feel themselves at ease. The final result of the workshop is a collective one: they will provide the facilitator with a number of suggestions, in order to allow him/her to design a suitable activity for primary school students.
We invite participants to be simple and to make the smallest number of calculations as possible, yet remaining reliable, in their opinion. Eventually, each group illustrates its own strategy, its vantages and disadvantages, while the other groups are asked to comment on that.

We’ll discuss the most interesting findings and results, stating that an embodiment learning process, reinforced by an inquiry-based and peer-to-peer approach, can help in building a more precise mental representation of the SS and allow students to take a step forward in their awareness of complex concepts as approximation, error, precision and simplicity.