National Aeronautics and Administration

Space Math - I National Aeronautics and Administration

Publisher Marketing: Teachers continue to look for ways to make math meaningful by providing students with problems and examples demonstrating its applications in everyday life. Space Math offers math applications through one of the strongest motivators-Space. Technology makes it possible for students to experience the value of math, instead of just reading about it. Technology is essential to mathematics and science for such purposes as "access to outer space and other remote locations, sample collection and treatment, measurement, data collection and storage, computation, and communication of information." This book is designed to be used as a supplement for teaching mathematical topics. The problems can be used to enhance understanding of the mathematical concept, or as a good assessment of student mastery. This collection of activities is based on a weekly series of space science problems distributed to thousands of teachers during 2004-2005 school year. They were intended as extra-credit problems for students looking for additional challenges in the math and physical science curriculum in grades 7 through 9. The problems were designed to be authentic glimpses of modern engineering issues that come up in designing satellites to work in space, and to provide insight into the basic phenomena of the Sun-Earth system, specifically 'Space Weather'. The problems were designed to be 'one-pagers' with the student work sheet (with the top line for the student's name) and a Teacher's Guide and Answer Key as a second page. This compact form was deemed very popular by participating teachers.