Ancient Navigators
This ancient civilization was one of the first great seafarers and used the stars to navigate the Mediterranean Sea.
Who are the Phoenicians?
Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of miles of open ocean without any modern instruments. What ocean did they primarily navigate?
What is the Pacific Ocean?
This era of Islamic history produced major advances in science, math, and navigation, roughly from the 8th to 14th centuries.
What is the Islamic Golden Age?
This general period of history, covered in Lessons 11–13, describes European sailors exploring and mapping the world from roughly the 1400s–1600s.
What is the Age of Exploration?
GPS stands for these three words.
What is Global Positioning System?
This is the name for navigation using the sun, moon, and stars to find your position at sea.
What is celestial navigation?
One of the 3 natural signs the Polynesians used to navigate
What are wave patterns, bird behavior, and star positions
Islamic navigators made major improvements to maps and our understanding of this concept that the earth is:
What is Round?
During the Age of Exploration, sailors had to deal with this major problem
What is celestial navigation was too inaccurate for cross Atlantic travel?
GPS works by your device receiving signals from these objects orbiting the Earth.
What are satellites?
This ancient Greek instrument measured the angle of stars above the horizon to help sailors find their latitude.
What is the astrolabe?
This traditional Polynesian navigation tool was made of sticks and shells and used to read wave and swell patterns in the ocean
What is a mattang (stick chart)?
This navigation tool, used in Lesson 10, measures the altitude of the sun or a star using a quarter-circle shaped device.
What is a quadrant?
This tool was invented during the age of exploration and allows travelers to know the direction of NORTH at all times
What is the compass?
To pinpoint your exact location, a GPS device needs signals from at least this many satellites at the same time.
What is 3 satellites? (4 for altitude)
This is the main reason the greeks needed to master travel in the Sea (Hint: Think of what would make them money)
What is Trading?
Polynesians often did not write down instructions for how to travel and instead did this
What is memorize and tell pass down information through families
Islamic scholars during the Golden Age preserved and improved upon the works of these two ancient civilizations' navigational knowledge.
Who are the Greeks and Phoenicians?
This is the country that first invented the compass, it originally pointed due south.
What is China?
What basic equation do satellites use to find your position using GPS (Hint: Triangles). (Bonus: what is it?)
What is pythagorean theorem
The Phoenicians used readings from their navigation tools to calculate position. Name one thing they could determine from those tool readings.
What is their latitude / position at sea / direction of travel?
Polynesian navigators could tell which direction land was by watching this type of animal fly at dawn and dusk.
What is the White Tern?
A navigator using a quadrant sights a star at a certain angle. What does that angle tell them about their position on Earth?
What is their latitude?
This is what we did to make our own homemade compasses.
What is rubbed a needle onto a magnet?
This is the term for the advanced triangulation satellites use to find Latitude, Longitude, and altitude
What is Trilateration?