Education
Satellite information for educators
Introduction
The use of satellite images as an education-learning resource allows to approach students with geographical, ecological and economic phenomena of their country in a innovative way. Through the concrete and active work with satellite images, the student can make observations, comparisons and measurements to corroborate or refutate his hypotheses, determine characteristics, relate variables and arrive at conceptual syntheses on the worked subjects. All these can be achieved with a much less abstract tool compared with traditional study materials, without trying to replace them, but to be used as a complement.
Suri Pluma in the classroom
Suri Pluma is a software designed for navigation and basic processing of satellite images, adapted to use in educative environments. It has very low requirements of hardware and software and its use is very easy, even for those who have never worked with satellite images.
Suri Pluma was used in the “Workshop on Remote Sensing oriented to Educators of Secondary Schools” dictated by the Argentina’s National Commission of Space Activities (CONAE) in November of 2006. Read more about Suri Pluma
Examples of activities
Deforestation of Misiones Province's Rain Forest
By means of the comparison of Landsat images from different dates, the effects of the process of deforestation of the rain forest in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay border are recognized.
Distribution of the population
With a map of permanent lights, obtained from images of the high sensitivity sensor OLS of mission DMSP, the distribution of the population throughout all the Argentine territory is observed, making possible to study patterns in the population processes and to relate them with the economic models that generated this pattern.
Urban area - Rural area
Using images of average resolution (Landsat, Spot, etc) of a city, urban and rural areas are recognized based on the characteristics of the terrain.
Climate change
Using images of the last twenty years from the most affected places on the earth, the withdraw of glacier and melting of eternal snows is quantified, working with the measurement tool provided in the software.
