Cosmic Scale / Powers of Ten
Suggested
Year Group:
5-6
Relevant KS2 Links: SC1 2f, 2h; SC4 4; MA2 1a, 1b, 1e, 2c, 2f, 2i;
MA3 1a, 2c, 3b; Art & Design 1a, 1b, 5b
Base Concepts Conveyed: The scale of the universe is truly immense.
We can explore things that are amazingly small and unimaginably large.
Carefully measuring the scale helps to put things in perspective and see how
they are related.
EQUIPMENT
•
•
Powers of Ten film (see below for different ways to obtain/view this);
Rulers and pencils for each student to use with accompanying worksheets
INTRODUCTION:
The groundbreaking 9-minute film Powers of Ten, produced in 1977 by Charles and Ray
Eames, starts with a picnic scene and then zooms out in powers of ten to the edge of the
universe and then back down to the scale of atoms. It provides an excellent perspective
view that can help lend an intuitive understanding of decimal places in mathematics and a
general appreciation for how areas of astronomy, biology, physics etc. are all connected.
In the associated drawing activity, students create their own zoomed perspectives of
common objects using quantitative measurements.
TEACHING:
Talk a bit with the class about the relative sizes of things. What’s the smallest thing that
they can picture well? What’s the largest thing? What’s the biggest number of things they
can picture in your head? How many marbles do they think it would take to fill the
classroom? Write down some guesses and then show how you can make a reasonable
estimate by breaking the problem into smaller pieces:
1)
2)
3)
4)
How many marbles would fit into a good-sized cup? (perhaps 100, depending on sizes)
How many such cups would fit into a shoebox? (perhaps 10)
How many shoeboxes would fit into a 1m cube? (perhaps 100)
How many 1m cubes could fit into the classroom? (perhaps 10 x 10 x 3 = 300)
So, the estimate might be roughly 100 x 10 x 100 x 300 = 30 million.
Assumes
Intro to Atoms
Electrons & Electricity
How about a more difficult question: How many times further away is the sun compared
to the furthest you’ve ever walked? How many times smaller is an atom compared with
the size of the earth? How big is the universe compared with the size of the solar system?
These are very difficult things to grasp, even for adults! Watch the short film, Powers of
Ten with the class, which tries to put some of this into perspective. There are different
ways to view the film:
1) The film is currently posted on YouTube with the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBsOeLcUARw
2) Go to the website http://powersof10.com/
After registering an email address, you can watch the film as a Flash video. The film
appears in a relatively small window, so you may need a screen magnifier programme
that actively updates. For Macs, this is already included as a zoom feature that can be
activated from the keyboard. For PCs, you can download a freeware programme, such
as Iconico (http://www.iconico.com/magnifier/). Make sure the settings
automatically update the picture.
2) You can also purchase a DVD of the film. See the Powers of Ten website above
(though it may only be available in Region 1 format).
ACTIVITY:
Pass out the accompanying worksheets, in which the students are asked to produce their
own zoomed perspectives, starting with a basic scene and then scaling by 2 successive
orders of magnitude in both directions. This might make a nice outdoors activity, where
the students could focus on leaves or branches etc., but it could also be performed indoors
as well. The activity could take a while, depending on how much detail they put into their
drawings, so it could either be done over a couple days as part of an arts project or
assigned as something to be done at home. Alternatively, enlarged versions of the
worksheets could be made and worked on as a single class project, with different groups
in the class working on drawing different scales from a jointly selected scene.
Powers of Ten Zoom
Choose an object you can see to be the focus of your zoom. Draw a picture
of what you see looking down on a 1 metre square surrounding this object in
the large box below. Use a ruler to make sure everything is drawn to the
correct size. The lightly drawn grid of boxes (each 10cm on a side) should
help you do this. The main object for the zoom should be centred on the
small dotted box in the middle of the larger square.
1m
On the following pages, draw the same scene again, but where the size of
the square you now view is indicated on the left of each drawing.
For zooming in, the small dotted box in the middle of the 1m square will now
take up the full size of the 10cm square. The small dotted box on the 10cm
square will then take up the full size of the 1cm square.
For zooming out, the scene in the full 1m square becomes only the small
dotted box in the 10m square, and that 10m square only fills the small
dotted box of the 100m square.
10 cm
1 cm
10 m
100 m