NPR’s Planet Money has a nice story on why gold is used for money. They take the entire periodic table of elements and eliminate the ones that don’t work because they’re too reactive, a gas, too common, or too toxic. You’re left with five precious metals, rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold, but only one of them has a low enough melting temperature so that it can be worked easily and is not ridiculously rare.
Also, Tony Clayton has a wonderful webpage on Metals Used in Coins and Medals. It has some fascinating details about the history of these metals and their alloys in coinage. For example, “In Old English the Latin word aes was rendered as brass, thus the use of the word brass to mean money still found today, especially in Northern England. “
Controversial map purporting to be based on an earlier 1418 map of Chinese exploration of the world. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Most of the exploration we studied this cycle were European expeditions. One group wanted to do something a little different, so I suggested they look in to Chinese explorations of other parts of the world. There was much Chinese commerce across the Indian Ocean, and in a non-Christian twist on the “God” theme for exploration, the Chinese brought Buddhism back from India in the third century AD (we’re studying exploration under the themes of God, Gold and Glory).
Another interesting aspect of research into Chinese exploration is the rather controversial work by Gavin Menzies that suggests that great Chinese fleets explored the Americas and circumnavigated the globe in the 1420’s, a long time before Columbus and Magellan.
There is a lot of evidence that there was no such Chinese expedition, but it’s a fascinating hypothesis and, in a way, very similar to the All About Explorers project: although Menzies’ work is not an intentionally educational hoax. Indeed, it is much more subtle and much more detailed. My favorite line of critique asserts that Menzies’ books, “.. may well prove to be the Piltdown Man of literature.” I don’t know if I’ll have the time to try to unpack that one for my students.
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
One of the major motivations space exploration is the search for extra-terrestrial life. The SETI project is the most visible initiative and there are a lot of neat educational resources on their outreach page. And you can participate. seti@home allows you to download a screensaver that actually helps them process data.
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is used (a little) for the SETI project. Image by Jaro Nemcok on Wikipedia.
The NPR program, To the Best of Our Knowledge, has a nice program asking the question, “What is Life?” The last part of the program (at about 45:00 minutes in) is an interview with Paul Davies who is head of the SETI post-detection task group. It starts with question of silicon based life, the theory of which is based on the locations of carbon and silicon in the same column in the periodic table. It also talks about what life might look like once technology really takes off and life starts “evolving by design”.
Finding life as we know it
But SETI searches for signs of intelligent life using radiotelescopes. There are other projects that look for any sign of live. One of the major reasons the Mars rovers and satellites spend a lot of time looking for signs of water on the planet is that life, as we know it, requires water.
Europa: Image from NASA.
It’s also why space agencies are so interest in Europa, the moon of Jupiter that’s covered with ice. Europa also has signs of volcanic activity under the ice, which makes it doubly interesting.
All About Explorers is a wonderful site if you’re interested in talking about the credibility of sources. It looks real, is well organized, well written and could easily pass for credible to the uninitiated. The article on John Cabot starts with:
One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure.
Now, there are more telltale clues that everything is not on the up-and-up, particularly where they mention Cabot’s cartographic exploits on his ”alleged” return to England from growing up in Italy:
In 1484, John Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. This was a great career move for John. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far East.
I find sites like these delightful. To think that someone spent the time, energy and intelligence to create this particular little snare, says something wonderful about way the human mind works.
Nicely, the “About This Site” section notes:
All About Explorers was developed by a group of teachers as a means of teaching students about the Internet. … Because we wanted to make a point about finding useless information even in a site which looked at first to be fairly well put together, all of the Explorer biographies here are fictional. While many of the facts are true or based on truth, many inaccuracies, lies, and even downright absurdity are mixed in indiscriminately. As such, it is important that you do not use this site as a source of reference for your own research!
The site also has a set of lessons, handouts and other stuff on its “For Teachers” page.
This wonderful animation shows the exploration of the North American Coastline from 1500 to 1876, updating the map as the different explorers push further along the coastline. Most of the action occurs to the north, as expedition after expedition sough the Northwest Passage.
What’s nice, is that the names of the explorers, like Cabot and Franklin, should be familiar to students after this cycle’s research.
We just used my sailing game, Mariner AO, to help wrap up the group presentations on the European exploration of the Americas, and it worked wonderfully!
The small groups did their presentations timewise, starting with the Vikings (don’t ask me about Leprechauns), then the Spanish, the French (don’t ask me about giant sharks and flying pigs), and finally the English. At the end, we had half an hour left, but instead of just tying it together with a graphic organizer, I wanted to show them Mariner AO because the North Atlantic wind circulation ties in so wonderfully well with the pattern of colonization.
I started trying to show it off as a group, having them tell me which direction to sail the ship to get to the Americas. As you could probably predict that didn’t work particularly well. Everyone was yelling out directions at cross-purposes; however, it did give me the chance to show them all how the game worked.
Even with all the confusion the group seemed to like the game. Someone even suggested, “Why didn’t we do this for group work.” And I though, “Why not?” So the class broke apart for 25 minutes to see who could discover America first.
There was a lot of excitement in the room. I offered them extra points for the team that reached America first. They all know how empty that reward is by now so I think most of the excitement really came from being able to play a game with a little bit of competition.
Building a ship to try to discover America.
The website still has a few bugs, especially on our older computers, but it worked. Three of the four groups reached the Americas, though two of them landed on the Canadian coast. The third group may well have ended up there as well, but I dropped a hint about Columbus’ route that sent them sailing into the Caribbean.
At least two kids planned on trying it at home. I had to pry one of the groups away from the computer so they could get their end-of-the-day jobs done on time.
We took screen captures of routes they took, and tomorrow we’ll put it all together, talk about the trade winds, what Columbus knew, and why the Iberians colonized South America while the French and English ended up mostly in the North.
