Scale of the Solar System

Our planet is nestled in a solar system with great distances between planets. To illustrate this accurately in a textbook is, well... impossible. A teacher who authors the blog ScienceFix uses the sidewalk in front of his school to demonstrate the scale of our solar system. He uses objects to scale to accurately portray the sizes of the planets such as the head of a pin for Mercury, or a bean for Saturn. To get accurate placement of the planets, teachers may use Google Maps to find where to place each planet for the most accurately laid out learning activity for conceptualizing the scale of our solar system. This is a great example of using Web 2.0 tools to create better lesson plans.

This blog post is dedicated to our dear friend Pluto.