Support for long-term classroom planning and professional development. Information covering important topics for today's educators and parents. Each CD-ROM in this series features lessons using interactive multimedia such as satellite images, digital video, and original animations on different aspects of earth science. This CD-ROM features an interactive, game format called The Planetary Exploration Simulator, in which students, as planetary explorers, are required to visit many alien worlds and to collect scientific information about these worlds. The students' mission is to learn about Earth and its environment in the universe.
Students can decide the area of investigation, and the path that leads to the answers.
Each topic offers extensive chapter text with pictures, simple animated charts, and movies with original animations, as well as interactive exercises, and quizzes featuring match games and puzzles. The purpose of these Exercises is to have students experience science investigations, data analysis, theorizing and other methods of science. Sample topics covered include Planet Earth, Plate Tectonics, and Structure of the Oceans, in addition to Meteorology, Satellite Explorations, and The Solar System. In accompanying sample exercises, students reassemble the earth's continental pieces as they appeared around 200 million years ago in a single continent called Pangaea, and discover plate boundaries by plotting the locations of earthquakes and volcanoes. In the meantime, students watch such movies as Sea Floor Spreading showing real and animated examples of how the process of plate tectonics works, Volcanoes and Igneous Rocks, and Unique View of Plate Boundaries, highlighting a different view of our planet with satellite imagery of land, vegetation, and schematic of the plate boundaries.