Solar System: Teacher Manual

1. The first ten minutes

The tool opens on a Mission dashboard that says "choose a journey. Pick up where your evidence leaves off." Six journeys are listed with their checkpoint counts. Below that sits Free orbit Explorer — "choose a world, choose a view, and collect evidence at your own pace."

That structure answers the first question teachers have about open-ended 3-D tools: what stops students just spinning planets? The journeys do.

1. Pick one journey for the whole class on day one rather than turning everyone loose. Earth → Mars expedition is the strongest opener: four checkpoints, and it connects a launch experiment to surface evidence to a written explanation.
2. Read the four steps aloud before starting: Predict, Compare arrivals, Scan + sample, Save report. Students know where they are going.
3. Start the mission. The first checkpoint is a prediction about launch alignment — made before any result is visible.
4. Only then open Free orbit Explorer, once students have a reason to look at a world closely.

Note what the tool says about grading: "written explanations are not automatically graded." Checkpoints reflect activity records and saved work. The tool tracks that a student did the thing; judging the quality of their explanation is your job, and the tool does not pretend otherwise.

2. The six journeys

The dashboard tracks journeys complete and journal records, and can be collapsed to give the 3-D view the full screen when you are projecting.

3. Three lenses on every world

Under "choose a scientific lens," each world can be examined three ways. Teaching the difference between these is itself a science-practice lesson: the same object, three questions, three representations.

Nine worlds are available — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — tagged by type: rocky, gas giant, ice giant, dwarf world. Earth is pinned as a reference world so every comparison has a familiar anchor, and visited worlds are marked with a green dot against a 0/9 counter.

The Orbit model lens is where Kepler's laws become testable rather than recited. Students change orbit shape and watch the period and speed respond. Ask them to find the relationship themselves before naming it.

4. The scale walk, and why it is the best activity here

Build a scale walk is the feature to plan a lesson around, because it addresses the misconception no diagram can: students believe the solar system looks like the pictures, with planets comfortably spaced and comparably sized.

Every textbook illustration is compressed — it has to be, to fit on a page. The consequence is that students carry a mental model where Jupiter is a bit bigger than Earth and Neptune is a few inches further out. A scale walk breaks that by making the distances physical.

1. Build the scale walk in the tool and note the distances it produces.
2. Take the class into a hallway, a field, or the length of the building, and pace it out. Assign students to stand at each planet's position.
3. The moment that lands: the inner four planets are all within a few steps of each other, and the student holding Neptune is too far away to talk to.
4. Back in the room, ask what a textbook diagram has to distort to fit on paper — distance, size, or both. (Both, and never by the same factor.)

The tool notes on screen that the portraits are "illustrative · not to scale" and that rings are shown on all four giants. The scale walk is the corrective, and the juxtaposition is the lesson.

5. Three classroom walkthroughs

A. Earth to Mars, one period (grades 6–9)

1. Whole class on the Earth → Mars expedition. Checkpoint 1 is a prediction about launch alignment — everyone writes theirs before running.
2. Compare arrivals. Students see why you cannot launch at Mars whenever you like; the alignment matters.
3. Scan + sample at Mars, then Save report.
4. Discussion: why does a real Mars mission have launch windows about every 26 months? Students can now answer from what they just did.

B. Why seasons happen (grades 4–8) — the misconception lesson

1. Before opening the tool, poll the class: "why is it hotter in summer?" Most will say Earth is closer to the Sun. Write the tally on the board.
2. Run ☀ Opposite seasons, all four checkpoints.
3. The decisive question the journey sets up: if summer were about distance, why is it summer in Australia when it is winter here? Distance cannot be two things at once.
4. Re-poll. Have students who changed their answer explain what changed it — the evidence, not the authority.
5. Extension with the Orbit model lens: Earth's orbit is slightly elliptical, so the distance does change. Ask why that does not cause the seasons. (The tilt effect is far larger, and it has the right sign for each hemisphere.)

C. Comparative planetology (grades 8–12)

1. ◐ Earth + Jupiter comparison journey, using the Size scale lens for the diameter comparison.
2. Then Explore on both: surface, atmosphere, interior.
3. Ask which parts of the interior view are measured and which are modelled. The tool labels inferred interiors as models — that is the answer, and finding it on screen is the exercise.
4. Students write a comparison grounded in the reference values, flagging clearly which of their claims rest on direct observation and which on inference.

6. What is evidence and what is interpretation

This tool is unusually explicit about the status of its own images, and that makes it useful for teaching the nature of scientific representation. Three statements appear on screen:

• "Portraits, terrain, colors, and cutaways are interpretive."
• "Listed measurements are reference values."
• "Inferred interiors are labeled as models."

There is also a "Science notes · reviewed August 2026" marker, so the review date of the content is visible rather than implied.

Make this an explicit lesson, not a disclaimer students scroll past. Ask: "nobody has photographed Jupiter's core. So where does this cutaway come from?" The answer — gravity measurements, magnetic field data, models constrained by physics — is a better account of how planetary science actually works than any diagram presented as a photograph. The planets are also illustrative and not to scale in the portrait view; the scale walk is where students get the real proportions.

7. The evidence journal and checkpoints

Open evidence journal holds the records a student accumulates. The dashboard shows journeys complete and journal record count, and an evidence preview summarises what has been collected.

Two things to know for assessment:

• Checkpoints reflect activity records and saved work — they show that a student did the work, in order.
• Written explanations are not automatically graded. The tool collects them and leaves the judgement to you. Read them; that is where the learning is visible.

For submission, have students open the journal and copy their records, or save their report at the end of a journey. As with the other AlloFlow tools, work lives on the student's device and is handed over by the student.

8. Accessibility and devices

• Simulation speed is adjustable, which matters for students who cannot track fast orbital motion — and for pausing on a configuration you want to discuss.
• Collapse dashboard gives the 3-D view the full screen for projection.
• World type is written, not just coloured — rocky, gas giant, ice giant, dwarf world — and visited state is a green dot plus a counter, so progress does not depend on distinguishing hues.
• This is a 3-D tool, so it asks more of a device than a text-based one. If a Chromebook struggles, reduce the simulation speed and collapse the dashboard before giving up on it.
• The scale walk is the accessible version of the headline idea. A student who cannot use the 3-D view at all can still do the hallway activity and get the most important insight in the unit.

9. When something looks wrong

Students say the planets look wrong or "fake."

They are right, and the tool agrees: portraits are interpretive and not to scale. Turn it into section 6's lesson rather than apologising for it.

The rings look the same on all four giants.

Stated on screen: rings are shown on all four giant planets. Saturn's are dramatically more visible in reality. Worth asking students why a tool might choose to show all four anyway.

Everyone is spinning planets and nobody is learning.

Assign a journey. Free orbit Explorer is meant to follow a guided journey, not replace it — the dashboard is the first screen for that reason.

A student's journey progress vanished.

Progress lives in the browser on that device. On shared machines, have students copy their journal at the end of each session.

Seasons: a student insists it is about distance.

Use the southern-hemisphere question in walkthrough B. Distance cannot explain opposite seasons at the same moment, and that argument changes minds when assertion does not.

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