I was recently asked to deliver a session on Earth Science for kids. My daughter goes to an after-school science program at Max Science where they teach science with unique and fun hands-on experiments. They wanted to do an interactive session to introduce the kids to Earth Science and asked if I could deliver a guest talk for their kids in Grades 1 to 4. I loved the idea and developed a module titled The Science of Satellites to introduce the magic of remote sensing to primary school kids. The session ended up being a lot of fun, for the kids and me. In this post, I want to go through the materials and my experience teaching this session.

All the content developed for this session – including high-resolution graphics – is available freely for download. Scroll to the bottom to find the download link.

The 1.5 hour session was split into 3 parts:

• Part 1 Guess the Place A game to guess the place from satellite images
• Part 2: The Science of Satellites Learning what satellites do and how can you build and launch a satellite
• Part 3: Your Name from Space An activity where kids create their from letters seen from satellite images.

An added challenge for the session was that the centre had a ‘no screens‘ policy. So I could not use slides or projectors. I made the session using props and printed posters – which actually turned out better – since kids could touch and interact with them.

Part 1: Guess The Place

Part 2: The Science of Satellites

What do we use satellites for?

Now that the kids knew what satellite images looked like, we moved on to learning how satellites are useful and what can they be used for. This was done with help of A3-size posters I had made. We had covered the text with masking tape and took them off to reveal use case of satellites as we talked through them.

How to make a satellite?

I asked the kids of what can be a satellite? Can we put any object in space and it will be a satellite? How to make a satellite that will actually be useful to us? We then learned about parts of a satellite. I had a beautiful 1:20 scale model of the RISAT-1 satellite gifted to me by NRSC, ISRO. I used that to explain different components of a satellite. We then used a poster and kids correctly guessed the different parts. The diagram was simplified and used terminology that 1st graders can understand. For example, instead of Guidance and Navigation system – I used Star Tracker.

How to Launch a Satellite?

We then talked about rockets! I had a small model of ISRO’s GSLV-MK2 which I used to demonstrate the launch process and how the satellite gets to the orbit. The kids were very curious about how fast does a rocket go and what fuel do they use.

Where to place the satellite?

We can place the satellites in different orbits around the earth. The orbit will depend on what we want the satellite to do. I simplified the discussion of orbits into easy-to-remember acronyms LEO (Low-earth Orbit), MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) and GEO (Geostationary Orbit). We didn’t get into Polar or Sun-synchronous orbits as they are a subset of LEO. I demonstrated the concept of orbits using my MOVA Globe and a satellite model to show that satellites in LEO move faster and as you move away from Earth – the orbit becomes bigger and satellites take longer to complete the orbit. Finally at GEO – the speed of the satellite matches that of Earth – and they appear stationary from Earth.

The Strangest Satellite

Part 3: Your Name from Space

I was inspired by NASA’s amazing work on finding ABCs from Space. There are many natural and man-made objects on Earth that resemble letters of the alphabet. I designed a hands-on activity where the kids create and take home a souvenir of their name spelled with letters from satellite images. We had printed and prepared squares with each letter of the alphabet. The kids had to locate the letters of their name and stick them on a cardboard to spell their name. The kids loved the idea of having their ‘name’ made out of real satellite images of our planet.

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I have been using and teaching Remote Sensing all my career – but teaching kids and seeing them getting so excited about Earth Observation was a truly rewarding experience. Thanks to Sarvesh Tripathi and the whole team at Max Science for their support and facilitating the session. I hope to develop more content to help kids of all ages experience the magic of remote sensing.

The full materials developed for this class can be downloaded as science_of_satellite.zip . This zip file containing the graphics, ABCs and hi-res images of landmarks I created for this session.

The material is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY license. You can freely use and adapt this material any way you like as long as you give the credit to the author.

If you know of or have developed content for teaching Earth Science to kids – I would love to hear about it. Please do share it in the comments.