A Google Earth Grand Tour of the Terrestrial Planets

2016 
ABSTRACT Google Earth is a powerful instructional resource for geoscience education. We have extended the virtual globe to include all terrestrial planets. Downloadable Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files (Google Earth's scripting language) associated with this paper include lessons about Mercury, Venus, the Moon, and Mars. We created “grand tours” of these bodies, guiding students to explore atmospheres, magnetospheres, landscapes, and interiors. The tours benefited from a study of 364 students in an introductory astronomy class. We compared learning outcomes for students using Google Earth versus static portable document format (PDF) files. In pre- and immediate posttests, there were small but statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) learning gains from the use of Google Earth; however, these did not persist in a long-term follow-up. There may have been insufficient differences between viewing text and images in Google Earth placemark balloons versus identical text and images in a PDF document. Conseq...
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