Monday, November 27, 2006

Amelia the Pigeon and Remote Sensing

The amount and quality of educational resources from many suppliers on the web is astounding. One example I stumbled on recently is NASA's The Adventures of Amelia the Pigeon. This is a Flash-based interactive web adventure for Earth sciences. It introduces the basic ideas of remote sensing to children in grades K-4. Rather than starting out with satellites in space, it uses the device of a young girl who explores her city with a small aerial camera carried by a homing pigeon. With the availability of Earth imaging products such as Google Earth and NASA's own WorldWind, there are plenty of opportunities available to explore the Earth from high above without ever leaving your computer. Amelia is a great way to introduce kids to how things look from above, and to how we interpret what we see in aerial and space based images. This is part of program called IMAGERS (Interactive Multimedia Education for Grade School Education Using Remote Sensing).

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