Our student scholars enjoyed their first day of Planetary Adventures and Outer Space, as we investigated our own neighborhood, as a backdrop for understanding the vast neighborhoods of outer space, with asteroids, planets, stars, and objects spinning, rotating, and revolving with gravity. To build conceptual understanding of space, we first explore what types of things are local versus far away, and then how you might be able to travel to those locations with different transportation modes (bike, walking, car, plane, boat, rocket), before jumping into our much larger solar system. Students solves problems such as how to get to space destinations, why being too close and too far to the sun is a problem. Ultimately what you might do to navigate to your own world that you design.
If Earth were a marble, how far away would Mars be from Earth? Our oldest students did measurements to better understand the scale of outer space.
Maps help us to navigate everywhere, including space. they are critical, when planets are moving!