Using Google Earth to teach math

by Google Earth Blog on Dec.20, 2012, under 3D Models, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, California, Denmark, England, Germany, Google Earth News, Google Earth Tips, Google Sky, Google maps, Hawaii, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Natural Landmarks, Netherlands, Sightseeing, Street Views, USA

We love to see ways that Google Earth is being used in classroom settings around the world. Frank first showed some uses for this back in 2006 and we've shown you other ideas over the years.

Most of those ideas revolve around geography, as you'd expect, but today's example is a way to use Google Earth to help teach math! As explained in the Primary Ideas blog, they've come up with two ways use use the "ruler" tool to work on math skills.

Calculating Area and Perimeter

The ruler too can be used to measure the dimensions of the school playground, a football pitch (see below), a child's garden, the courtyard of Buckingham palace or even The Pentagon, anywhere really! This can be either as a whole class on an interactive display, with everyone calculating areas and perimeters based on the measurements taken or as individuals taking measurements on computers or hand held devices.

Converting Lengths

I've usually done this converting between centimetres, meters and kilometres, but it can also be used to practise converting metric to imperial or vice versa. The example below shows how the length of one side of the Pentagon can be measured and then converted into various different units of measure.