Exploring Mars and Beyond

Rating:
Summary: Exploring Mars and Beyond (Challenging Level)
Review: This is the third of a three-part series by Teacher Created Materials. The earlier titles are _Exploring Mars (Primary)_ and _Exploring Mars (Intermediate)_.

The first half of this 80-page book is devoted to the history of space exploration, the latter half to Mars exploration. The illustrations are black-and-white line drawings. The content includes both didactic text as well as 15 activities. Some of the activities appeared to be useful; others seemed relatively weak (e.g., whispering a message from student to student to illustrate time delay and message breakdown in communicating with distant space vessels).

Although this book is subtitled "Challenging," it appeared to me that the text and activities were no more difficult than those for the "Intermediate" text (which I have). This, actually, is the substrate for my main complaint about this book--Approximately half of the "Challenging" book herein reviewed appears to be exactly the same as the "Intermediate" book. It is not only that the content is the same and just covered in more depth. Rather, many of the pages appear to be exactly the same, or the same with only minor editorial changes.

This, then, is the reason for my giving this book only 3 stars. If the material it contained had been novel compared to the "Intermediate" book, I would have given it 4 stars, because the books did include some useful teaching ideas. I will be keeping only one of these books (either the Intermediate or the Challenging) and returning the other because of the redundancy, but I *will* keep one.

The other difficulty--one that cannot be easily surmounted, so neither the author nor the publisher can be faulted--is that even with a publication date of 1998, it is already somewhat outdated, in terms of both "Post-Lunar Landing Space Exploration" and Mars exploration.