Alexandria K. Gombas Ameer Hosein Gianna Castano Barbara Chaparro
The ME telescopes are over 60 lb mounts that must be secured to permanent piers that have been cemented onto the roof of COAS. The astronomy students have to learn to assemble these telescopes during ..
The ME telescopes are over 60 lb mounts that must be secured to permanent piers that have been cemented onto the roof of COAS. The astronomy students have to learn to assemble these telescopes during their labs each semester. We have been working in tandem with the astronomy department to simplify their assembly manuals for the ME, Mx, and Mx+ telescopes. Feedback from ERAU students indicated that they were struggling to clearly understand the assembly process and reported the current instruction set to be cumbersome to use. Through a review of human factors and educational literature, a set of best practices was developed to create a template for a new instruction set that breaks down each step and pairs it with two images per page. The language was simplified into bulleted direct command statements rather than paragraphs. Once the ME manual was completed, we ran a pilot study where two teaching assistants and a professor walked through the manual during assembly. Currently we are making the necessary changes based on the pilot. The next steps will be to conduct a full usability study with naïve students and to apply the template to the other telescope models.