Sortify: Space Exploration Common Misconceptions

You may find some points of debate or discussion during Sortify: Space Exploration game play. Here are some notes to help you guide these conversations:

•  The image below shows the optimal way to play this set, points-wise. The board can be cleared in one round, earning triple points.

• Due to the width of the game screen, you can only string together a maximum of 8 tiles in a sequencing bucket. The Order the Bodies of the Solar System bucket is therefore broken into two sequences. As long as each sequence is in the right order (even with gaps), it will be marked correct. Note that Earth can come before or after the moon, because they split being farther from the sun about evenly.

• Although Neptune is occasionally farther from the sun than Pluto, and likewise Pluto is occasionally farther than Eris. However, both of these events happen for less than 10% of either body’s orbit, so for the Order of the Bodies bucket to be marked correct, the tiles must be arranged in the order shown in the image below.

• In the Discoveries & Missions bucket, students pair up a celestial body with a person who’s strongly associated with it, or with a spacecraft that visited that body. Note that Galileo can be paired with moon, Jupiter, or Saturn. Copernicus goes with the Sun (because of heliocentricity.) Sputnik and ISS do not pair with anything because they just orbit Earth, and that’s not a celestial body.