RESEARCH ON THE WEB
Map Projections

The Web is a wonderful resource for conducting research, especially if you want to see a lot of illustrations. For this portion of your research, you will investigate the use of latitude and longitude and check out a variety of map projections.

To conduct your investigation, work as scientists do—predict what you may discover, make observations, and record what you see. Look for patterns. Afterwards, offer hypotheses to explain those patterns. Don't worry if your hypotheses are sketchy right now; any testable hypothesis is a valid starting point. When scientists test their hypothesis and discover that their observations and data do not match their hypothesis, they redefine their investigation by improving the test and gathering more data, or refining the original hypothesis based on the new data before testing again. In your investigation, you can return to the computer if you need to observe more details. Then revise your hypothesis or develop a new one based on each new round of observations.

Bring your journal to the computer and go to:

http://www.hammondmap.com/sites/hammond/geography/geography.html

Click on "latitude and longitude" to learn more about these mapping measurements. Use some of the questions below to structure your investigation and take notes in your journal.

The same site offers a variety of map projections—but what on Earth is a map projection? To find out, go to:

http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj.html

Scroll down to "related overviews" and click on "Map Projections." Here you will find an overview explaining what map projections are; you can also look at a wide variety of map projections. Investigate what's there and take notes in your journal. You might want to stick to maps of North America so you can easily see the differences between the projections. Take a look at Mercator, Azithumal, and Conic projections and check out the unprojected maps of the world or North America.

It might also help to see these projections in motion, so you can see how cartographers "projected" the globe onto another surface in order to create the map. Take a look at animated versions of the polar and Mercator projections. You can find some at the Museum's Antarctica resources Web site

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/antarctica/mercator.html

http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/antarctica/polar.html

Remember to record your observations in your journal.


QUESTIONS TO GUIDE YOUR STUDY

Use the questions below to guide your journal notes and include drawings in your journal to illustrate your ideas. If you're working with a team, discuss your observations with your teammates. Remember to record in your own journal your observations about map projections.