Pre-Monday Meeting

After school on Monday I'll be meeting with the students. This will be the real beginning of the project. We'll meet once a week (holidays permitting) until the end of the year. By then, students should be working on their own projects. Here's a email I sent to the students this morning. Note that in this post I included the answers to the questions I posed to them.

As you've probably heard we'll be meeting after school on Monday. This first meeting, and the next couple, will review various topics in planetary exploration. Each meeting will probably last about half an hour. If anyone wants to stay a little while longer, I can go over the software a little and install it on a couple more computers.

Before we meet, I'd be grateful if you could take 5 minutes and answer the following questions. I'm sending them because the current thinking in education is you don't try to teach people something unless you first understand what they know and what they don't. So, just answer these questions off the top of your head without looking anything up. If you don't know any of the answers, please respond with an email saying "I don't know" so I release you read the email. Feel free to take wild guesses.

Do you understand geodetic coordinates (latitude/longitude)?
Yes.

What is the prime meridian and how is it selected? What is the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator called?
The prime meridian is the line at 0 degrees longitude. It doesn't define which direction positive longitude is measured in or if negative numbers are used to describe longitude. These social conventions vary.
To the best of my knowledge, the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator has no name. I think this is very interesting. The familiar Cartesian coordinate system is all about "the origin", the point where the X and Y axis intersect. We usually scale data just to get the origin on the graph. But in a geodetic coordinate system, the origin goes unmentioned.

Can you name the three most basic kinds or types of rock?
Igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic

Can you name several kinds of geological features?
Mountains, volcanoes, rivers, craters

Can you list the four most important geological processes?
Volcanic, tectonic, impact cratering, erosion.

I'll post after the meeting to report on how it went.