01
Recordar
Begin with familiar experiences and a guided somatic exercise, allowing students to approach the subject playfully and remember through the body.
Education · movement · astronomy
Recreo Espacial
Astronomy and physics explored through the body, movement and collective experience.
The project
Learning astronomy through the body
Recreo Espacial applies the principles of Embodied Learning to physics and astronomy. Participants become investigators who use their bodies and sensations to ask scientific questions, test ideas and contribute their observations to a collective learning process.
The activities are not designed only for intellectual understanding. They create a playful and exploratory space in which movement, improvisation and conversation help connect abstract concepts with direct experience.
Unexpected results are treated as opportunities rather than errors: a new movement or interpretation can open a different scientific question for the group to explore.
Method
Remember, explore, dialogue
02
Explorar
Play and improvise individually or as a group, using movement to explore the principles introduced at the beginning of the activity.
03
Dialogar
Share observations and reflections in a guided conversation. Animated resources can support this stage, but the bodily experience remains central.
Activities
Five embodied explorations
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Movement of the Moon
Develop an intuition for the Moon’s motion and recognize that everything in the Universe is in constant movement.
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Gravity
Feel gravity through the body and explore, through choreography, the idea of gravity as a deformation of spacetime.
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Conservation of energy
Alternate rapid movement with inward attention to experience kinetic and potential energy, angular momentum and conservation.
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Star formation
Use improvisation to explore how stars form, bringing together ideas developed in the earlier activities.
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Planet formation
Explore mechanisms of planet formation through movement and apply the physical principles experienced throughout the programme.
Animated resources
Visual support for the classroom
The project developed short animations as a companion to each embodied activity. They illustrate the phenomena explored through movement rather than replacing the experience.
Recreo Espacial seeks to awaken interest and affection for science by presenting questions, wonder and exploration as natural parts of human experience.
The project was developed as an outreach initiative of the Millennium Nucleus for Protoplanetary Disks (MAD), with institutional support from the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Astronomy at Universidad de Chile. It also benefited from the participation of public schools in the Aysén Region and Colegio Media Waldorf de Limache.