There are linkages between different elements of the mission. Students find that their deductions and inferences connect with actual situations and lead them deeper into the story. Pondering the images enables students to marshal their facts, draw on their earlier work, share insights, and piece together different strands of thought. In this brief exercise you see how students use images as a rich source of visual information and as the focal point for inquiry and investigation. This use of images is a profound change from their role as captioned pictures in textbooks.
Images become clues in a mystery story that stimulates students to wonder, question, and speculate.
As students experience success in interpreting images, they gain confidence in their own ability to figure things out. Science is no longer a set of facts to be memorized, but a set of questions to be explored. Authors Daniel Barstow is Project Director of the Mars Education Program at TERC, and leads a group of projects whose focus is geographic visualizations.