Enhancing student involvement in astronomy teaching

Since years, an astronomy introduction was taught to second year students in physics as a mixture of theory and exercises to learn to work with the equations and the derived laws. This year we replaced the exercises by a series of tutorials in which the students have to gather their own data with a robotic telescope in New Mexico and a virtual one. The data are then analyzed using the theoretical concepts. The set-up uses several concepts from popular computer games: ownership, suspense, failure and success, community membership. This approach leads to more student involvement and a greater willingness to acquire supporting knowledge through self-study.