We suggest students work in pairs. If possible, we recommend pairing students of similar heights together. This way, when the students remove the sticky notes from the wall, they should be able to easily reach them. Homeschool students can work on their own.
Decide Where Students Will Jump
Each pair of students needs a blank space (a wall or cabinet) where they can place their sticky notes and measure their jump height. If you have enough space in the classroom this is ideal, but you can also do this in the hallway.
Set up Planet and Moon Exploration Stations Before Class
We suggest printing out two sets of the Planet and Moon Exploration Stations so that a maximum of 4 students are at each station at a time (given a class of 32 students). Each student will only need to visit 4 stations. We suggest placing one set of these stations at opposite ends of the classroom or one station on desk clusters of 4 so that students have the most room to spread out.
Teacher Science Background
We have rounded numbers to simplify the gravitational differences between Earth and other planets and moons. If you or your students are curious, the exact amounts of gravitational pull and how they compare to Earth are listed here:
- Earth | 9.81 m/s2
- Moon | 1.62 m/s2 | 5.98 times less gravity than Earth
- Jupiter | 24.79 m/s2 | 2.55 times more gravity than Earth
- Mars | 3.71 m/s2 | 2.61 times less gravity than Earth
- Titan | 1.35 m/s2 | 7.18 times less gravity than Earth
- Triton | 0.78 m/s2 | 12.43 times less gravity than Earth
- Neptune | 11.15 m/s2 | 1.15 times more gravity than Earth
Even though they are much larger than Earth, both Jupiter and Neptune are gas planets, which means that they have much lower densities. Uranus is much larger than Earth, but because the density is much less in comparison to Earth’s, the gravitational pull of Uranus is actually less than that of Earth.
