Author Description

Teachers continue to look for ways to make math meaningful by providing students with problems and examples demonstrating its applications in everyday life. Space Mathematics offers math applications through one of the strongest motivators-Space. Technology makes it possible for students to experience the value of math, instead of just reading about it. Technology is essential to mathematics and science for such purposes as "access to outer space and other remote locations, sample collection and treatment, measurement, data collection and storage, computation, and communication of information." Image Scale Math is designed to be used as a supplement for teaching mathematical topics. The problems can be used to enhance understanding of the mathematical concept, or as a good assessment of student mastery. This set of math problems can be used as an application for students to gain mastery of scale of an image using a variety of images. This collection of activities is based on a weekly series of space science problems distributed to thousands of teachers during the 2004-2008 school years. They were intended as supplementary problems for students looking for additional challenges in the math and physical science curriculum in grades 6 through 8. The problems are designed to be 'one-pagers' consisting of a Student Page, and Teacher's Answer Key. This compact form was deemed very popular by participating teachers. The topic for this collection is Image Scaling, which is an important First Step that all astronomers perform in understanding image-type data produced by satellites in space, and telescopes on the ground.