Encouraging Application, Analysis, and Synthesis in a Survey Space Weather Course

All students enrolled in the University of Colorado Aerospace Engineering program take an aerospace environment course in the first year of graduate school. An ongoing instructional challenge is balancing the competing elements in the course: 1) Familiarization with a vast array of space weather terminology and concepts relevant to spacecraft design and operation; 2) Development of computational techniques; and 3) Preparation for preliminary exams. Additionally, there is a strong expectation that beginning graduate students engage in intellectual activities at the higher end of cognition (Bloom's taxonomy). In this presentation we will discuss the tools we use for “out of class activities” that transition students from lower level cognition (knowledge and comprehension) to the more engaged activities associated with application, analysis, and synthesis. We will discuss the mix of computational and simulation exercises that draw from resources provided by the NASA's Community Coordinated Modeling Center, NSF's Center for Integrated Space Weather Modeling Summer School and other academic and industry forums.