Mars Math By NASA

  NASA has created a whole series of Space Math books filled with a variety of problems for grades 3 to 12.  Today, I am looking at one of those books whose math deals specifically with the planet Mars.

Mars is one of those planets which has caught everybody's attention from the past to the present.  Even the cartoons had Marvin the Martian who gained quite a bit of popularity.

Although the ebook is not very thick, only about 78 pages, all activities are only one page long and include the answers.  The book includes a 'Math Topic Matrix'

If you look the lesson on 'Modeling the daily temperature of Mars', you'll see it covers averages, a graph or table analysis, coordinate plane/points, modeling, and trig.  Multiple skills to challenge the students and put a more realistic feel to activities.  It is not like the problems to practice the one skill found in a text book.

Another page contains the standards being met.  Although the phrasing is a bit older, it is easy to find the current Common Core or NCTM ones and use those. 

Each lesson includes the information a student needs to use to solve the problems given.  This lesson includes a line graph using the time in sols vs temperature.  The last questions asks students to predict the temperature at a time in the future based on the pattern.  There is a third page with the information on Viking 1 and Viking 2 so you could have students graph the information from Viking 2 before answering the same questions for this new graph.

One of the questions asks students to create a sine function to provide best fit for the information. As I said the answers are provided complete with the math calculations if you are not that strong in figuring out the equations. 

The activities are divided into three grade groups,  3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 but those are guide lines.  I've looked at some of the exercises in the first group and several of my students would struggle to complete them because they have issues applying fractions in this type of setting where they are given information as clues.  The clues are set up to tell you that something is a fractional size of another planet which is a fraction of a planet whose size you have.

I have to travel in August to a conference at the beginning  of school and I think I might just go ahead and use a few of these for math while I'm gone.  The sub can use the answers to help students complete the assignment if needed. 

Check it out and let me now what you think.  I'll be checking out other books in the near future and reporting back.  I'd love to hear back from you.