For S282 Astronomy I had the task of running a whole-module week-long tutorial in a forum on the subject of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. I had actually done this a couple of times before, so I relied heavily on experience.
I like these week-long tutorials. I enjoy the conversational aspect, and the ability to spend time giving effective and accurate responses to question.
The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is simply a graph of the intrinsic brightness against surface temperature for stars. It turns out that stars actually plot in certain well defined patches on the graph and these areas correspond to stars at particular stages in their life span.
It is a very important diagram in astronomy. Students need to be able to reproduce it in the exam, and they need to know the evolutionary paths of stars of various masses around the diagram.
So I aimed to get students discussing important points of the diagram, contributing their own sketches of the diagram, and marking on an evolutionary track for their favourite star.
Also I get students to create their own H-R diagram using a spreadsheet and a set of data from
http://www.astronexus.com/node/34
(I used the magnitude 7.5 limit - there are lots of stars in this).
Gaining familiarity with using spreadsheets is one of the objectives of the module, so this activity fits in very well. this also gives the students an opportunity to help each other with Excel or Open Office or Star Office (or whatever version they are using).
As usual, the session went well and a few students clearly made progress with their spreadsheet skills.