Meeting Two Wrap-up

Following the advice of an experienced teacher, today was a hands-on session. I prepared over half a dozen areas on Mars to look at. The idea was students would gain some experience in using PEP and try to identify some features on Mars.

The four students from the first meeting successfully installed PEP on their home computers. Today two more students joined the project.

Soon, I'll post some details on the specific features we looked at. First, I just wanted to say it went better than I expected. Students didn't have any problem using the simple features of the software. Given a geodetic coordinate (a latitude and a longitude) they can easily pan and zoom to the location. They didn't have any problems creating and understanding elevation cross sections. They can identify easy features such as volcanoes, craters, rivers and wind streaks. The idea of superposition (new features forming on top of old ones) made sense to them as we looked at intersecting features.

For the two new students, this was their first look at the software and they also missed my overview of planetary geology lecture. They didn't seem any worse for it. So, maybe the first lecture isn't needed and instead students can begin with a hands-on exercise.