The Astronomy of Hogwarts Legacy

As an astronomy professor, I’m always searching for accurate depictions of the night sky in media. 

My recent research into Hogwarts Legacy reveals how the game’s developers have crafted an immersive world, replicating celestial phenomena with surprising accuracy. 

From real constellations to accurate planetary motion, the attention to detail is unlike anything I've seen in any other game. 

Despite a few creative liberties, the game’s alignment with real-world astronomy sets it apart from most media representations of the sky.

Read about the astronomy of Hogwarts Legacy here.

Fortnite Physics Playground

Video games make awesome laboratories, offering players the ability to bend the laws of reality as they explore life-sized experiments. 

I’ve been exploring Fortnite as a tool for science education. With support from a generous Epic Games MegaGrant, my students and I developed a series of playable Fortnite experiments and associated teaching materials. 

The culmination of this work is the Fortnite Physics Playground, where students can extract physics data directly from the game engine as they design and perform their own experiments.

Learn more about our Fortnite Virtual Labs here.  

Learn Build Win

In the summer of 2024, I partnered with Kent District Library to develop educational programs that leverage gaming technology to inspire young people to explore new career paths, enhance their technical skills, and increasing engagement with the library's services.

One of the first projects we launched was the Fortnite Creative Design Challenge. In this contest students are challenged to create a new sporting event in Fortnite Creative. 

The contest began in late May and concluded in early August. The top entries were featured in our online Gold Medal Ceremony. 

The top entries received $1,000 gold, $500 silver, and $250 bronze cash prizes. 

AVH Astronomy

In the Fall of 2016, I began an effort to take all of my professional passions (astronomy, online education, and technology) and weave them together in a single venture. I had been an adjunct professor at my local community college, teaching astronomy online, since 2009. I decided to pursue teaching at other colleges in the hopes of becoming a “full-time adjunct” professor.

As an online adjunct astronomy professor, I have found the perfect job for me. I can pursue my interests in astronomy, education, and technology all while sharing our amazing universe with students. You can check out some of my astronomy lecture videos on my AVH Astronomy YouTube Channel.

Fortnite Virtual Labs

I love exploring the math and science of video games. After spending a few years playing Fortnite with my children, I began to dig more deeply into the physics of the game, trying to measure the acceleration due to gravity and the speed of the in-game vehicles. 

This exploration led me to several conversations with amazing educators who are passionate about learning and gaming. With their prompting and encouragement, in May of 2023, I applied for and received a MegaGrant from Epic Games (the makers of Fortnite) to develop a Fortnite Virtual Laboratory Curriculum. 

The curriculum includes a set of educational islands that invite students to collect data in-game in order to explore a wide range of physics topics including: terminal velocity, projectile motion, free-fall acceleration, and distance rate time. 

My Viral Video

In July 2013, I posted the video, Speeding save you less time than you think.  Over the next 10 years, it slowly accumulated approximately 5k views, averaging less than one view per day. 

For reasons I do not understand, on Oct 15, 2023, the YouTube algorithm began recommending this video to hundreds of people every day. This continued for one month and then, on Nov 12, a period of exponential growth began (see the straight line on this log scale). The video peaked at nearly 100,000k views per day and dropped almost as quickly as it rose. 

A freebooter posted a clip of my video to TikTok and it promptly garnered over 1M views. So I posted a clip to Instagram, where it got over 7M views in one week!

I don't understand why the video went viral, but my best guess is due to it being brief, interesting, relatable, and sharable. 

Ted-Ed: The Moon Illusion

In the summer of 2013, I submitted a video concept to TED-Ed, the makers of these fabulous animated lessons. To my surprise and excitement, they selected my idea to create a video on the perplexing “moon illusion” – the phenomenon in which the moon appears larger when it is rising/setting than when it is overhead.

The first step in the process was to write a script, then the TED-Ed team selected an animator who created a storyboard version of the video before producing the finished product.

The animators and the TED-Ed team did such an awesome job turning this concept into an amazing piece of educational artwork. I’m super excited that I was able to be a part of the creative process. Enjoy the video here: The Moon Illusion - Andrew Vanden Heuvel.

Teaching from Space

In the summer of 2009, through my participation in the NASA Endeavor Program, I had a two-week internship at the Teaching from Space office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. (If you know anything about my background as a wanna-be astronaut, you can imagine my excitement working alongside astronauts at NASA.)

I met several astronauts and toured their training facilities, but the bulk of my time was spent writing physics demonstrations that would be performed by astronauts on board the International Space Station. I even had the chance to be on the console at Mission Control while some astronauts performed education activities in space.

Within a few weeks, the demonstrations I wrote were being recorded in space! Check out some of the results: Centripetal Force, Cohesion, and What Time is it in Space?

STEMbite

After my incredible experience as a Glass Explorer, I began developing a video series that I call “STEMbite.” The videos are essentially bite-size lessons in science and math from everyday life – all captured from a unique first-person point of view through Google Glass.

I’ve been having tons of fun making the videos! Check out the STEMbite YouTube Channel or STEMbite on HippoCampus.

I’ve also begun experimenting with STEMbite Live events, where I host a public Google Hangout exploring science and math. My very first STEMbite Live was at the end of the 2013 school year, and I hope to host more in the school year ahead.

The Edgerton Piddler

As a young college student, I was inspired by the famous high speed photography of MIT professor Harold Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light. In the summer of 2003, while doing research in Boston, I was able to walk the halls of the MIT physics department, where I saw one of Edgerton's most amazing demos, the so-called "Water Piddler." 

The real-time slow motion effect of the demo was so mesmerizing that I dreamed of making my own piddler someday. Well, after many fits and starts over more than a decade, I finally cracked the nut (the key ingredient is the type of water pump that you use.) I built my own strobe light with UV LEDs and mounted the whole apparatus on the wall. The effect is pretty cool and gives my basement office a sort of "mad scientist" vibe, which I like.  

Zero-G Flight

As as high school physics teacher, back in 2008, I was accepted to the Northrup-Grumman Weightless Flights of Discovery Program, which flies teachers on a weightless training aircraft colloquially known as the "vomet comet." As a wanna-be astronaut, this opportunity was too cool to pass up. 

I ran a classroom contest across all of my physics sections, inviting students to design a Zero-G experiment to bring along on my flight. 

When I arrived on flight day, I was excited to discover that a local news team had come down from Milwaukee to cover my flight and visit my classroom the next day. Their new story provides an awesome documentation of my experience. 

A small group of students worked with me to analyze the results of the experiment, which we presented at an annual meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

Bank VH

Keeping track of my kids money was becoming a pain. They were too young for a real bank account and using cash was impractical. I wanted a way that I could easily “pay” my kids without transferring real money and yet allow them to keep track of their balances and “spend” their money when needed.

So I created a simple banking app for my family!

Bank VH is the most complicated and useful app that I’ve made. The app keeps track of three sub-accounts for each child: spend, save, and give. Both my wife and I can easily add or remove funds from any account and the balance will be updated across our devices in real-time. Check out this video for a demo of the Bank VH app.

Player Piano

I’ve always been fascinated by player pianos. These magical contraptions turn motion into music through a system of pedals, bellows, linkages, and gears. While modern player pianos are controlled by computer, the originals were operated by foot pedals, which create a system-wide vacuum that drives a pneumatic air motor and reads music from paper rolls.

In the fall of 2019, I got my hands on a half-working player piano and went to work on patching holes, sealing hoses, and cleaning off 100 years of dust. Just when I was about to give up on ever getting it to play music, I tried overwhelming the leaky system with a massive amount of suction – two vacuums: one on the motor drive and one on the music production assembly and voila – music began to flow.

Jukebox Restoration

I love to fix things – especially old mechanical things. The only problem is that I don’t know what I’m doing. So, I need to find objects that are broken just the right amount. Broken too much, and there’s no chance that I can fix it. Not broken enough, and it’s no fun to fix. Well, when I found this 1969 Rockola Princess Jukebox it was the perfect amount of broken.

When I bought the jukebox, all I knew was that the lights worked. My plan was to goof around inside, see if I could figure out how it worked, and worst case scenario, it would make a cool decoration (maybe with a bluetooth speaker inside to play music). As I continued to fiddle, clean the components, and flick switches, the juke box slowly came back to life. My only real innovation was to bypass the broken tube amp and use the guts of a $30 record player instead. The end result speaks for itself.

Living Worlds Space Art Contest

Thanks to the generous donation of a University of Notre Dame alum, the iLocater Research team was able to launch an ambitious new outreach campaign called the Living Worlds Space Art Contest. Elementary students were challenged to consider how life forms may have developed and adapted to living on newly discovered extrasolar planets.

I led our collective effort to develop and manage this new student contest. Our first year was a tremendous success with over 1,000 student entries from ten different states. The students winners were announced in April of 2016 – you can explore their awesome artwork and creative writing first-hand by following the links in our press release.

TEDx CERN

As part of my whirlwind experience with Google Glass and CERN, I was invited to the TEDx stage to present along with Steve Myers, Director of Accelerators and Technology at CERN.

I greatly enjoyed the time I was able to spend with Steve – he shared some fascinating stories about his long career at CERN, including his early days when they would go for jogs through the underground tunnel when the accelerators were being updated.

Our talk was a little awkward since it was promotional of Google Glass (and I made the mistake of cutting off Steve and jumping ahead of the script a bit). In any event, it was an amazing experience. You can check out the video of our session here: Steve Myers and Andrew Vanden Heuvel at TEDxCERN.

Color Dash

Paint colors have such interesting names – from “Distant Thunder” to “Chocolate Froth.” I thought it would make a fun family game for players to invent their own color names. Each player looks at the same color sample and invents a name for it. The dealer writes down the real color name and then reads all of the options for players to choose which one they think is correct. Scoring is similar to Balderdash, where players earn points for guessing the right answer or getting others to choose theirs.

The first iterations of the game involved snagging hundreds of paint samples from the store, which quickly got embarrassing. Fortunately, Behr Paint provides a complete list of all 4,000+ of their paint colors along with an associated RGB color code. Armed with this information, I created a mobile app version of Color Dash that displays a random paint color and then reveals the name of the color only when the dealer presses a special button.

Developing Online Courses

The world of education is rapidly changing, and online courses are now part of the mainstream. A new paradigm of “any time, any where, any place, any pace” learning is transforming K-12 and higher education.

I’ve been blessed to be part of this paradigm shift, having developed several online courses in math and science. Working with the non-profit Michigan Virtual School, I created  AP Physics, AP Biology, AP Calculus,  Astronomy, Biology, and Precalculus courses. As an adjunct instructor at Calvin College and Grand Rapids Community College, I’ve also developed and taught college-level physics and astronomy courses online.

I’ve always seen teaching as a creative activity, but developing online courses provides a wonderful opportunity to explore a full range of creative interests: writing, movie-making, instructional design, and more.

Making Apps in School

Do you remember when "Apps" were the new hot thing? Well, I do. Back in 2012, everyone was going app-crazy. I worked with a small team of computer science teachers to create two teacher training courses centered around making apps in school. 

One course focused on making apps in the classroom with the Android-specific “App Inventor” tool (which is by far the best way for teachers to make apps). The second course centered on iPhone/iPad app creation using web apps combined with PhoneGap Build. 

In those early days, I gave a number of talks and training sessions on how to create apps. In fact, I still have a link to the resource page from my talk at the 2013 MACUL conference.

Minifig Stand

I love LEGO Minifigures – they are the perfect collectible toy. They’re cheap, fun to play with, and come in endless varieties. The problem is that LEGO has never made a proper display stand for minifigs.

I set out to create a simple minifig display stand that allows children (especially my own) to organize and display their favorite minifigures. In my view the perfect stand should be uniform in color, tiered so you can see all the minifigs at once, and (of course) made out of LEGO.

After building a few samples, I made about 30 kits and shared them with friends and family. While I briefly entertained the idea of making and selling the minifig stands at a larger scale, I quickly realized the challenging economics of selling your own LEGO custom kits. While the project has run it’s course, you can still use my instructions to build your own LEGO Minifig Stand.

Clickity Clickers

I’ve always admired simple solutions to complex problems. Classroom clickers (or “student response systems” as they are sometimes known) have always struck me as overly complex – distributing one very specific device for one very specific purpose in the classroom.

The reality in most classroom is that students already have a handy device in their pockets, and these cell phones can easily be used to provide instant feedback to teachers.

So I created Clickity – the world’s simplest student response system. Simply ask the question, assign a color to each possible answer, and poll your students on the fly.

The Physics of Osmos

I love video games that make physics fun! One of the best physics-based video game of all time is Osmos, the 2010 iPad Game of the Year.

While the core objective of the game is simple (become the biggest mote), you quickly discover the myriad of complex physics principles that the designers baked directly into the gameplay. Newton’s Laws of Motion, the Conservation of Momentum, the Rocket Equation, and Orbital Mechanics – they all become an essentially component of leveling up.

After becoming enthralled with the game, I wrote a blog post about how you could use it in the physics classroom. A few weeks later, the makers of the game contacted me! They were super cool, and we had several extended conversations of physics, education, and video game development – it was awesome!

Ultimately, we decided to run a "Physics of Osmos” contest in the winter of 2012. It was a great success, and a deserving high school student won a new iPad for his great submission.

In 2014, I wrote up a formal article on the way-cool physics of the game. After a few years of being lost in an abandoned email account, the article was eventually published in the peer-reviewed journal, The Physics Teacher. You can download and read the full article here.

Video Game Physics

Creating labs for online science courses is always a challenge. One of my favorite approaches is to ask students to analyze the physics of a video game.

Using the free Tracker software, you can extract data from any video or screen capture file. I simply record a small snippet of a game and then ask students to collect data to answer an interesting question. For example:

• If Angry Birds uses realistic gravity, then how large is the slingshot? 

• In Plants v Zombies, when will the fast zombie pass the slow one?

• In the game Osmos, is momentum conserved?

Mr. Doodle

Mr. Doodle is the leading character in a series of printable activity sheets that I created for classroom teachers. On each sheet, students must use their ingenuity and creativity to help Mr. Doodle escape. Using whatever tools the students want to invent, Mr. Doodle will climb up, drill through, fly over or glide past any obstacle that stands in his way.

Check out these sample activity books to play Mr. Doodle yourself.

• Mr. Doodle and the Dinosaurs

• Mr. Doodle’s Shape Escape

• Mr. Doodle and the Construction Site

Color the Universe

The universe is full of color, but only a few people ever get the opportunity to explore the full spectrum of the universe the same way that professional astronomers do.

The Color the Universe project was created to provide students an opportunity to work directly with real images from the Hubble Space Telescope. After a series of activities introducing them to the EM spectrum and the equipment on Hubble, students learn how to use special sofware to analyze real astronomical pictures.

The crowning achievement of the project is when students choose one of six different astronomical objects and create their own beautiful color image of outer space.

This was my first project as a paid freelancer, working with USA TODAY Education. I conceived and built the whole project all the way through the final website.

The Day I Discovered...

I enjoy taking on new challenges and getting an article published in a national magazine always seemed like an achievable goal to aim for. So, in 2007, I set out to write an essay for the preeminent astronomy magazine, Sky and Telescope.

I wrote a reflective essay on three astronomical discoveries that I made during my short career as an astronomer. My goal was to illustrate how the more “professional” I became as an astronomer, the less meaningful, personally, the discoveries became. You can read the article here.

The story behind how the article was eventually published is worth telling because it illustrates just how long some of these goals can take to achieve. My first email to the editors at S&T was in October of 2007. I received no reply until May of 2008 – a full 7 months later. The editor liked the idea and asked me to prepare a 600-word essay, which I turned around for them within a couple weeks. After some back-and-forth in the summer of 2008, there was once again radio silence. In March of 2010 (18 months since my last contact), I received an email from an editor at S&T asking if I had authored an essay that they had in their files – it was my long lost submission. And so, over three years after my initial inquiry, my brief article was published in the July 2010 issue of Sky and Telescope.

GIS Education

Michigan Virtual University, in partnership with Eastern Michigan University and the Michigan Math Science Center Network, received NSF ITEST funding for the “GIS Resources and Applications for Career Education” (GRACE) Project.

My role in the project has been to develop GIS-enabled science and social studies lessons that capture student interest in GIS careers. Ultimately, our work will lead hundreds of students to technology-infused internships in a growing career field.

But wait, I hear you asking, “So, what is GIS?” To put it simply, you could think of Google Earth on steroids, but you really should check it out for yourself. Visit ArcGIS.com to start exploring.

General Revelations

As a science teacher and a person of faith, I see profound connections between the physical universe and the spiritual truths expressed in the Bible. Along with many other Christians, I see nature as God’s “general revelation” to the world.

This project started as a series of devotionals I prepared for students at Calvin College. Each week, we would examine a scientific concept and explore what it might be teaching us about our God and ourselves.

I’ve begun turning these devotionals into brief YouTube videos as a small experiment in online Christian education. My hope is that they will be edifying to both students and adults alike. Check out the videos here: General Revelations - Andrew Vanden Heuvel.

NASA RealWorld-InWorld

The NASA RealWorld-InWorld Engineering Design Challenge was a one-of-a-kind program that began with a real-world problem currently facing NASA engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope. Students worked in teams to design and build a prototype solution. They then move into a virtual world environment (think SecondLife), where they work with college engineering students to build a full-size mock-up of the design. These projects will imitate the way in which companies that are focused in the area of aerospace machining will create prototypes. It’s a real-life project.

The culmination of the project is a live, virtual presentation in which the teams of students guide NASA engineers through their solution, presented in the virtual world. A team of experts then selects one team to win the competition.

I had the great pleasure of working with folks from NASA and the National Institute for Aerospace to develop the program, including the online curriculum that students work through as they devise, build, and present their solutions.

Creative Living

My grandfather, Rev. Ralph Heynen, made his career as the chaplain at Pine Rest Christian Hospital, a mental health facility that was originally created by members of the Christian Reformed Church. Throughout his prolific career, he created a tremendous wealth of writings and radio broadcasts.

In an effort to preserve my grandfather’s work and make it available for generations to come, I am digitizing his radio broadcasts and serializing them in podcast form. Subscribe to his “Creative Living” podcast on iTunes in order to keep up with my work on this effort.

AIVA Platform

This is the project that started it all.

AIVA – the astronomical image visualizer and analyzer – was meant to be an educational web tool that allows students and the general public to interact with the same images of the universe that professional astronomers use.

Astronomical images, in their raw form, contain much more information than can be shown in a single .jpg picture. The problem is that you need special software to open and display the raw astronomical images. The AIVA platform will change all that and make world-class astronomical images accessible to the general public.

I originally intended to start AGL Initiatives as a non-profit to seek grant support to develop AIVA into a full-fledged educational tool. I even created a promo video and website to get the ball rolling. I still think it is an awesome idea.

Asteroid Discovery Lab

This project actually pre-dates AGL Initiatives, but it is still a goody.

Ok, so in 2003, I accidentally discovered an asteroid. Here’s the long story short. My college professor and I quickly realized that the approach I used could be replicated, and we went on to discovery many more asteroids. (In fact, Calvin College, my alma mater, has discovered more than 400 additional asteroids since that first discovery, including four that were discovered by some of my high school students.)

While I was still in college, I created the “asteroid discovery lab” so that I could share the thrill of discovery asteroids with young students. The project is a Google Doc with six animated gifs of astronomical fields. Students search the animations for new asteroids and then record and report their discoveries.

The images in the project were originally used to discovery 12 new asteroids. So, the project closely reflects the true asteroid discovery process.

KickStart Curriculum

The problem with online curriculum vendors is that they insist on total control of their content. As a result, teachers lose their freedom to improve, enhance, or personalize any digital curricula that they use in their online or blended classes.

I’ve been working to develop “KickStart Curriculum” to resolve this problem. Here’s the concept:

Schools pay a reasonable one-time expense, then they own the full curriculum in a highly editable format (Moodle, Blackboard, or just plain Word documents). Teachers use this digital curriculum as a seed to develop and grow their own custom blended learning curriculum.

I’ve been working with a team of teachers to create a pilot course we call “Modular STEM.”