Zoom into Microscopic Worlds
With the Java applet Secret Worlds: The Universe Within, your students can view the Milky Way at 10 million light-years from Earth. Then they can move through space toward Earth in successive orders of magnitude until they reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, they can begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and, finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
Also sent a collection of projects being done by different schools; some use
Google Earth; others use Google Maps.
The site has had over 15,000 visitors. You might want to use it. Schools
are from several different states and different countries.
Some of the topics include explorers, history of students' local communities
(very popular), heroes and courageous people.
Some of the GCT's have submitted projects to this site.