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Visualizing the Earth and Moon Relationship via Scaled Drawings

Science Scope—December 2009

Students’ difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film A Private Universe (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will remember the challenge the interviewees experienced when trying to explain their understanding of this phenomenon. This paper describes a strategy to help students develop a model of the Earth/Moon relationship that is correct both in terms of the scale sizes and the distances between them and extends previous work present in Science Scope (see Wallace, Dickerson, and Hopkins 2007: Riddle 2006a).
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