P2K - To Mars with Mer

To MARS with MER - Interact

LIVE FROM MARS Program 4
Destination Mars

October 30, 1997, 1-2 p.m., Eastern

Destination Mars is a one-hour taped program that will be available to teachers on October 30, 1997. This edited compilation of previous programming is intended to allow you either to:

introduce an entirely new class of students to the unit by providing a digest of the "story to date." Teachers may then implement the entire Live From Mars electronic field trip in fall '97 as one complete teaching unit, culminating with the live broadcast of Program 5, "Today on Mars," on November 13, 1997.

Or to:

review the LFM Module begun in the 1996-1997 school year and reengage students to resume their roles as members of the Mars team before beginning the activities suggested for Program 5, "Today on Mars," airing in November. This would work, for example, for 5th graders who will enter 6th grade in '97-98, especially with a preplanned "hand-off" between 5th and 6th grade teachers.

"Destination Mars" will carry students from the launches of Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Pathfinder through Pathfinder's landing and Sojourner's deployment. It will incorporate the best student interactions from the earlier live programs and the most engaging and informative responses from NASA's Mars mission team. It will include some of the hands-on demonstrations featured earlier, and thus--along with this Guide and the project's online resources--provide new adopters of Live From Mars with a complete orientation to the project. It will also feature updates on both Pathfinder and Surveyor, including a first look at the imagery and science data that have already been received (though MGS will only just have arrived in September to begin four months of aerobraking to lower itself into its final mapping orbit.)

To assist you in using this program, a transcript will be published online as an HTML document, linking images and other resources to the words and sequences of the videotape.

Since the content of the program is a compilation of the "best" of what's gone before, we suggest you choose from the activities already proposed for Programs 1 - 3. Online you will find teacher input selected from discuss-lfm, with comments about how best to implement these Activities in the classroom. In some ways, therefore, what you'll be able to do in fall 1997 should be even more powerful than what we've initially suggested, since you'll be standing on the shoulders of your colleagues who already implemented Live From Mars and contributed new creativity to the project.