A whole-body activity that explores the relative sizes, distances, orbit, and spin of the Sun, Earth and Moon. Full description.

This is the third in a series of three booklets designed to teach students about basic mathematical and physical principles such as logarithms, geometry, and size and scale. Each book is loosely based on the NASA GLAST mission. The activities teach about radians and degree, angles, parallax, and the apparent sizes of objects. Students create and use devices to measure the apparent sizes of objects ... Full description.

This is a companion book to the Traditions of the Sun Web site. Students can use this book to learn about the Sun's dynamic nature, explore images from NASA's cutting-edge solar missions and understand more fully the human connection we all have to our Sun. The book also allows students to see how the Sun-Earth connection is made at Chaco Canyon, including the sunrise over Chaco Canyon's great kiva, ... Full description.

The Active Galaxies pop-up book is a very large rectangular pop-up book with foldouts that was developed for use in classrooms for grades 5 and up and for special needs audiences. Active galaxies, a major scientific target for the GLAST mission, contain super-massive black holes at their cores, and sometimes emit jets of particles and light. When opened, a model of an active galaxy with jets pops ... Full description.

Black Hole Explorer is a board game that lets you build a spaceship and fly to a black hole. While the idea of flying to a black hole is fantasy, the game provides many opportunities for experiencing phenomena based on current black hole research. During the game, the player will experience the dangers and excitement of a real space mission, and learn about the nature of black holes by launching scientific ... Full description.

In this computer-based exercise, students analyze realistically simulated X-ray spectra of a supernova remnant and determine the abundances of various elements in them. In the end, they will find that the elements necessary for life on Earth -- the iron in their blood, the calcium in their bones -- are created in these distant explosions. The product consists of both downloadable software (PC only) ... Full description.

Getting Dirty on Mars is a fun and interactive way to introduce students to the basics of soil science. Based on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, students will simulate what it is like to collect soil samples just like the Phoenix. By measuring for themselves many of the properties scientists use to characterize soil samples, students will be better prepared to interpret those properties as used in actual ... Full description.

The main scientific instrument on the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is the Large Area Telescope (LAT). This interactive computer-based educational activity allows students in grades 11-14 and informal web users to see the results when gamma-ray photons of different energies and incident angles hit the LAT. The photons convert into electron-positron pairs which travel through 19 interleaved ... Full description.

The Jupiter's Red Spot Jr. Lithograph traces the emergence and color change of an Earth-sized storm on Jupiter. The storm appears to be the same color as Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot and has been dubbed Red Spot Jr. In the accompanying educational activity, In Search of...Monster Storms, students compare Jupiter's storms with those of Earth through a level 1 inquiry activity using the images ... Full description.

This activity demonstrates what a dipole magnetic field looks like in 3D. It was developed because the commonly used classroom demo (iron filings on a sheet of paper on top of a bar magnet) leads to student misconception that magnetic fields are two-dimensional. The reverse side of the litho features an artist-s conception of a gamma-ray image of a supernova. Full description.