While working on his Masters in Teaching and Learning at UCSD, Chris Halter developed, implementated and evaluated a series visualization-rich Algebra and Geometry lessons. During the Visualizing Earth Project, he revised and extended these activities and implemented them in his high mathematics classes.

Above left is an image of San Diego taken from the space shuttle in a low orbit. To the right is the image labeled with some of the locations that the students recognized. LJ = La Jolla, 52 = Highway 52, WHHS = West Hills High School, MB = Mission Bay, C = Coronado, and PL = Point Loma.

Another of the images used was a larger scale image of Southern California, which included San Diego. Among the features in this image that the students identified were the Salton Sea and the city of San Diego.

By looking at a series of images covering different amounts of area (the space shuttle was orbiting at different altitudes) within a region, the students realized that at smaller scale you can see more detail, while larger scale images show more area with less detail.

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