An activity-based approach to teaching astrophysics at the level of general-education course

Physics 002 is a general-education course on Introductory Astrophysics and Astronomy for non-physics majors at HKUST. The number of students enrolled each semester ranges from 250 to 370, a relatively large class by HKUST standards. The types of student enrolled are very varied, coming from all University departments. To design a course to educate such a large variety of students effectively, we have decided to make use of a combination of teaching strategies and methodologies: Activity-based Approach, Personal Response System, and WebCT. In this article we shall describe how we succeeded in implementing the above teaching methodologies in Physics 002. We will also discuss both the advantages and disadvantages in developing a general-education course such as Physics 002 using the above teaching methodologies