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Introduction to the KidSat Lessons

This Teachers' Guide contains information, material, and activities designed to help you (1) prepare your students to participate in the KidSat space shuttle mission, and (2) incorporate the images of the Earth (both those taken by your students, and the thousands that already exist) in your curriculum.

Different schools participate in KidSat in different ways. Some devote more class time to it than others. Some adapt their other curriculum (math, geography, earth science) to KidSat; others simply concentrate on understanding the mechanics of selecting and requesting photos, and incorporating those photos into existing curriculum. This Guide is intended to give you both the information that is essential for participating in KidSat, and additional information that you might, or might not, want to work into your lessons. 

In order to help you prioritize the material, we have identified the information that we consider essential on the first page of each chapter. Some chapters contain material that might be of interest, but can be skipped without compromising the students' ability to successfully select, target, request, and download pictures. Other chapters contain information that ideally would be covered before the shuttle flight, but that could be covered during or after the flight as well. 

In order to successfully interact with the KidSat Mission Control Gateway (and select, target and request photos), you and your students must be familiar with all the material in Chapter 7. (This chapter, of course, draws on some information in previous chapters, e.g. an understanding of latitude and longitude from chapter 5, and an understanding of the shuttle's ground track from Chapter 6). This chapter describes, among other things, the use of the SMOC web pages,

http://www.kidsat.ucsd.edu/kidsat/smoc

During and after the shuttle flight, your students can access their images at the KidSat data system:

http://kidsat.jpl.nasa.gov/kidsat/datasys

These are the two most important web sites associated with KidSat (and the addresses are repeated several times in this Guide). There are references to additional web sites, books, and other relevant resources, at the end of this Guide.

Teacher's Guide  
Page 1.1