# Planetary Science — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 15 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
90 minutes, and every student needs one crater somebody has already measured — Barringer, Tycho, anything with published dimensions they can look up. Minutes 0–10: the task is not to explore the simulator. It is to make the simulator reproduce a crater that already exists. Minutes 10–40: open the embedded crater-sim demo (or generate one with the prompt), feed in the impactor size, speed and angle the literature proposes for that crater, and set the computed diameter and depth beside the surveyed ones. They will not agree. Minutes 40–75: the residual — how large the miss is, which direction it runs, and what the simulation leaves out that would account for it. Worth chasing — whether the scaling law was ever fitted at that size, what atmospheric passage did to the impactor before it arrived, whether the target rock resembles the material the constants came from. Minutes 75–90: each student turns in a one-page calibration note — observed numbers, computed numbers, the size of the disagreement, and their best physical account of where it comes from. A simulation that matches an observation has taught nobody anything. The disagreement is the entire lesson.

## The assignment
**Make it (3D print).** Printed terrain from real elevation data the student selected: a crater, a rift, a volcanic feature. Print the same feature at two exaggeration factors and let students argue about which one misleads.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** An interactive explainer or small simulation of the process that formed the feature. Change one parameter, see the outcome change. Built by the student in an afternoon, no coding background required.

## 4-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Each student claims a feature and writes the formation question they want to answer; the feature’s elevation data defines the terrain to print.
- **Wk 2.** Submit the terrain print file, including the second exaggeration factor, at the start of the week. Fabrication runs while students build the model.
- **Wk 3.** Build the interactive simulation. Requirement: one parameter that, when changed, produces a feature that does not exist in nature, and an explanation of why.
- **Wk 4.** Show and tell with the printed terrain and the running model. Peers try to break the model.

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The problem set of cratering or orbital-mechanics calculations.
- **What is lost:** The hand-computation practice with the governing equations.
- **What is gained:** Students reason about where a scaling model breaks and why — the judgment a working scientist needs — instead of grinding through plug-and-chug problems, and they get a tangible landform to argue over.

## Where AI is bad at this
A model builds a physics simulation that returns a confident number for every input, including regimes where its scaling law no longer applies — extrapolating a gravity-regime crater formula into the strength regime, ignoring that low-angle impacts make elongated craters, and never gating physically impossible parameters. The clean output invites the student to trust results the underlying physics does not support.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Physical soundness of the question | 15% | The formation question is well-posed and answerable with the model's variables. |
| Finding the breakdown | 35% | Identifies a parameter regime where the model's result is physically implausible and demonstrates it. |
| Explaining the limit | 30% | Explains what physics the model omits or extrapolates past, not just that the number looks wrong. |
| Communicating with units | 20% | Axes, units, and scales are labeled so the result is interpretable. |

## Starter prompt
> Build a single self-contained HTML page with an interactive simulation of this planetary process: [describe the process]. Include sliders for the parameters that matter physically. Show the resulting landform update live. Label the axes and give units. Then tell me which parameter ranges produce results that are physically implausible, and why the simulation still lets me set them.

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 2 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $6–14 per student in filament **[unverified]** for terrain prints at two exaggeration factors in the four-week build.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 2 — submit the terrain print file (both exaggeration factors) at the start of the week the feature is claimed. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), so it clears before the week-4 show-and-tell.
- **Calendar dependency:** Simulation work needs no lead time. The terrain comes from the elevation data of the feature claimed in week 1, so its print file goes in at the start of week 2 and the up-to-14-calendar-day turnaround clears before the week-4 show-and-tell.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute calibration session producing a one-page note on why the simulator misses a surveyed crater; no fabrication.
- **4 weeks:** The seeded four-week plan: claim a feature and question, submit print files at two exaggerations, build the simulation with a documented implausible regime, then a show-and-tell where peers try to break each model.
- **One semester:** A full project — a self-selected feature from real elevation data, printed terrain at two exaggerations, an interactive process simulation with a documented implausible regime, and a peer session trying to break each model.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_