Grades 5–12
50 min
Science · Math · Health
Universal (every FFH program)
Learning Objectives
Use proportional reasoning to compare durations across many orders of magnitude — from seconds to billions of years.
Interpret time using familiar metaphors (a year as a life, a day as a year) — and recognize when those metaphors break down.
Apply time literacy to personal decisions: hours of sleep, screen time, walks, work, learning — over a lifetime.
Connect Marstronaut mission time, biological time (heartbeats, breaths), and cosmic time to a single framework.
🎣 Hook 3 min
Ask:
"If the entire history of the universe — 13.8 billion years — were compressed into one calendar year, when do you think humans show up? Earth forms? The dinosaurs?" Let them guess. Reveal:
"All of recorded human history — every war, every discovery, every person you've ever heard of — happens in the LAST 14 SECONDS of December 31st. Most of cosmic time is empty. Most of YOUR time is invisible. Today we're going to see it."
🧮 Math Setup 8 min
Quick math on the board:
- One year = 365 days × 24 hrs × 60 min × 60 sec = 31,557,600 seconds.
- 13.8 billion years = 4.35 × 10¹⁷ seconds.
- Ratio (universe : year) = 13.8 billion ÷ 1 = 13,800,000,000.
- So one second in the Cosmic Year = 13,800,000,000 ÷ 31,557,600 = ~437 real years.
That means: one heartbeat (at 70 bpm = 0.86 seconds) in the Cosmic Year ≈ 376 real years of actual history. A blink ≈ 200 years.
💻 Digital Exploration 15 min
In pairs, students use the Time Visualizer:
- Switch to 🌌 Cosmic Calendar. Notice: humans show up in late December. Recorded history is the last 14 seconds. Sit with that for a moment.
- Load "Your Day in 24 Hours." Toggle to ⏰ Lifetime Clock. Now your typical day is the clock. Sleep is 8 hours. Screen time is — how much? Walking? Cooking? Add real numbers from your life.
- Load "Your Lifetime in Hours." Same idea, but the clock is your whole life. How many years asleep? In school? Eating? On screens? (The numbers are staggering.)
- Build a custom comparison. A heartbeat. A song. A meal. A school year. Your lifetime. The age of the universe. Put them all on the same Duration Bars view and watch what disappears.
- Score 80%+ on the reflection quiz to earn coins.
⏱️ Live It: My Lifetime in Hours 15 min
Each student does the math for their OWN life. Pass out worksheets or have them write directly:
- Step 1: Assume an 80-year life. That's 80 × 8,760 = 700,800 hours total.
- Step 2: Compute hours spent (in 80 years) for: sleep at 8 hrs/night, eating at 1.5 hrs/day, school/work at 40 hrs/week × 45 years, screens at 7 hrs/day, exercise at 0.5 hrs/day, family time at 2 hrs/day, hobbies/joy at... what they choose.
- Step 3: Subtract from 700,800. What's left? (For most students: very little.)
- Step 4 — The Choice: If you cut your daily screen time by 1 hour and added it to something you love, what's the lifetime gain? (1 hour × 365 × 60 years remaining = ~22,000 hours = ~2.5 years.)
- Step 5 — Make it visual: Open the Time Visualizer. Build "What I do with my lifetime" as items. Save and share.
💬 Debrief 7 min
Four questions:
- Cosmic: What surprised you most about the Cosmic Calendar?
- Personal: Looking at your Lifetime Hours math — what number surprised you? What number do you wish were different?
- Compound: Why does small daily time, multiplied across a lifetime, add up to so much? Why do we struggle to see this in the moment?
- Marstronaut: A Mars mission is ~30 months. That's 21,600 hours. If you were on that mission, what would you want to do with that time? Could you tell time from a single window of changing red sky?
📣 Share It 2 min
- Writing: Write a 100-word post: "If my life were one year, today is..." Calculate the date based on your age.
- Math: Calculate one habit's lifetime time cost. Share the surprise.
- Cosmic: Post the Cosmic Calendar visualization with one event that surprised you. ("Did you know dinosaurs went extinct on December 30 in cosmic time?")
📐 Standards Alignment
ISTE 1.3 · 1.6
CCSS.Math.6.RP.A.3
CCSS.Math.8.EE.A.4: Scientific notation
CCSS.Math.HSF.LE.A.4: Logarithmic scaling
NGSS MS-ESS1.C: History of Earth
NGSS HS-ESS1.C: History of Earth
NGSS CCC-3: Scale, Proportion, Quantity
NHES 5: Decision Making
NHES 6: Goal-Setting
ASCD: Healthy, Engaged, Challenged