Overview
There are three activities included on this CD ROM; Map, Profile Game, and Geography Game. You can use one or all of the activities. All three of the activities have excellent tutorial movies which clearly explain the functions and the information contained in each of the sections.

Begin with the Profile Game. It allows a student to familiarize him/herself with the program and the information that is contained within it.

Then use the Map activity. If the students have been introduced to the program through using the Profile Game, you can let them watch the profile tutorial and independently explore the program. Our experiences have shown that for the average middle school level class, it is best to go through the tutorial as a group (this works well if one of your computers has a hook up to a television screen.) The Geography Game allows a student to test their knowledge of geographical locations, from the very simple to the very specific. The basic level of testing for knowledge of continents, countries, oceans, and seas is very useful in discovering what a student knows about geographical locations. This would be especially useful to EarthKAM students. It is important for them to recognize major geographical features that an orbit passes over.

Goals:

To become familiar with the tools and information stored in this database.
To discover properties of the Earth as exposed by accessing databases that the students would otherwise not have access to the data or an interface to utilize the data. To explore geologic features of the earth, and observe how the placement of earthquakes and volcanoes outline the crustal boundries of tectonic plates.

Central Question:
How does interaction of the earths plates result in geologic activity and where does this activity occur. Does the data in viewed support the Theory of Plate Tectonics

Materials for each team:
CD ROM "Our Dynamic Planet"
National Geographic Map, "The Earth's Fractured Surface"
Photocopy of the "Physiographic Chart of the Seafloor"
Other resources:
Activity sheets

Setting the stage:
Discuss with the students that geologists have been collecting data on the earth's surface features, volcanoes, and earthquakes and this data is complied into this database. Warn the students that this program is very powerful, but also crashes very easily on lower end machines. If students push buttons repeatily, it will not cause the program to run faster, but will probably crash the machine.

Exploration/Investigation
We began with the profile game. We found it most effective to go though the tutorial as a class. We went over sample #1 as a group and then the students returned to their group computers to work on sample #2. The students used the Profile Game to identify unknown features. The students investigated unknown features using the programs' tools, and then answered questions about that feature. A main feature of Our Dynamic Planet is the map activity. This activity contains a vast amount of data which is easily accessible to the student. It also has an excellent tutorial movie. Some of the databases that the students accessed were the elevation, earthquake, and volcano databases. In the visual display for the map activity, students are shown a Mercator projection of the world and are able to zoom in on any section. They can use the profile tool to draw a line across a feature they are interested in examining in profile view. The profile shows up beneath the map. The tutorial does an excellent job of explaining what information is shown in the profile. Since the map activity contains so many features, you may want to view only the begining part of the tutorial movie. Again, we suggest doing this as a class.
The students were given several handouts and a National Geographic map. We asked them to show profiles of five convergent, five divergent, and two transform margins. The margin types were reviewed at the end of the period.
We reviewed the map activity with a demonstration of the earthquake database and profile. We had the groups complete an activity using the profile tool and the base map. We had them draw several interesting profiles including;
Profile #1 click profile tool off the tip of India (Indian Ocean) to the middle of Siberia (across the Himalayas). We wanted the students to see how the profile of a collisional boundary appeared.
Profile #2 from the Pacific Ocean off Peru to the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil (across South America). This profile was useful in that the students could really see how the continental lithosphere floats higher than the oceanic lithosphere. They also saw a subduction zone in the west and a passive margin in the east.
Profile #3 across the United States, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, Again, the students could really see how the continental lithosphere floats higher than the oceanic lithosphere.
Profile #4 across the Atlantic Ocean. We wanted the students to remember how a mid- ocean ridge appears in profile. They called it an underwater mountain range.

Bringing it together:
Class discussion
After the students have become familiar with the maps, ask them to share some of the features they have mapped. Compare oceanic plates and contential plates.Assessment:
Diagrams of margins draw by students, answers that show an understanding of what is occurring at each type of margin.

Background:
Suggestions: Bump virtual memory up to 32 Mb, chose not to have 1000's of colors, and make sure sound is turned on.
By viewing the profiles, the students rediscovered that oceanic lithosphere is more dense, and therefore floats lower in the mantle, than the continental lithosphere. In profiles drawn across the Peru-Chile trench, one can actually see the trench which is formed when oceanic lithosphere is subducted beneath continental lithosphere. They "discovered" that mid oceanic ridges are underwater volcanic mountain chains. They also discovered information that wasn't introduced in the curriculum due to lack of time. They made cross sections across several subduction zones which were comprised of two oceanic plates. They discovered that the oceanic plate that was subducting was the one that floated lower in the mantle and therefore must be more dense.

Activity Sheets:
Student Activity sheet can be downloaded and printed from HERE.