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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.
Earth Sun Moon Distances
Basketball Earth
This resource uses a basketball as the Earth to set up a scale model to the distance to the Moon, satellites and distances such as the thickness of the atmosphere and the height of transatlantic jets. Students must do a card matching exercise to match objects to distances in their list. It is suggested that for satellite orbits, students could plot the orbital period and the velocity to find a relationship.
A spreadsheet is provided which enables the teacher to change the size of the Earth, if a different sized object is used, so that a new scale is calculated for distances, including the Earth-Sun distance and the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.
Earth-Sun-Moon distances
The aim of this resource is to give students an idea of the distances between the Earth, Moon and Sun by looking at the journeys of light and other electromagnetic waves between them. Students must fill in tables which give distances in terms of Earth circumferences, light seconds and kilometres.
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