INFORM

Teacher Activities
  
Student Activities

Inform students that they will be split into groups to examine the concepts related to analyzing remote sensing data.

Teacher Note: The aim of remote sensing image analysis in this part is to prepare students for interpreting the data. You can skip this activity if you don't have enough time to do it.

Activity 1: Interpreting and analyzing remote sensing images (Optional activity).

Break students into several teams and have them explore one of the following activities and record their findings on
Activity sheet: Watching over our planet from space (AI-1). You can download the entire Watching Over Our Planet from Space Kit or only the sections you choose.

Teacher Notice: The images in the following activities are mid or near infrared images not visible images. These images will be used to stimulate students' interest in interpreting images. Be sure that students analyze the collected visible images for the Kailua Bay coral reefs mission.

#1 : Which is which (3.1): Matching images with a description of features
# 2 : Find it (3.2): Finding and determining the location of features on an image
# 3: Measure this (3.3.a): Measuring distance

Optional Activity: For advanced data analysis, you may want to choose the following two activities.

  • #1 Forest fire activity (3.7): There are many forest fires every year. Satellite images can be used to map the type of vegetation, sources of water and areas that are difficult to travel over. In this satellite image, various colors show various areas. Student can identify the color of forest fire by analyzing the image.
  • #2: At a mine site(3.11) : Students can see what happens at a mine site while interpreting images. Spectral band combinations were used to show healthy and less healthy vegetation at this site.

Teacher notes:

  • Teaching time for each activity is anywhere from 15-25 minutes.
  • It may take a several minutes to download these files. (This file requires Acrobat Reader 4.0 or later. You can download v4.0 for free from: http://www.adobe.com /products/acrobat/readstep2.html).
  • Before teaching this activity, it is necessary to consider the time to download the file. You may want to identify the activities that students will complete and download the materials in advance.
  • It is highly recommended that you print the student activity sheets in advance.
  • Answers to these activities are provided.

Ask each team to briefly share the results from their investigation with the rest of the class. It may be useful to have them refer during their presentations to Activity sheet: Watching over our planet from space.

Debrief the "Watching Over Our Planet from Space" activities by asking each team to briefly describe the difference between mid-infrared images and visible images and why the colors in mid infrared images are not like visible images? See Activity sheet: Summary (AI-2).

Teacher resources for these activities:

Activity 2: Exploring the concepts of image color combination(Optional activity).

To explore why remote sensing image have the different colors, you may want to have students to examine the the following websites.

Have students choose the band they will use by Selecting color combination.

  

 

 

 

 

 

Student activity:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Students examine the websites.