Geography of Mars class at CSULB: GEOG 441/541

• A key student learning objective was development of a mental map of Mars

• I wanted students to have a sense of Mars as a place
• Geographers think of place as a kind of nested hierarchy
• Yucca Valley lies within the Morongo Basin, which is in the Mojave Desert of southeastern Califonia
• I wanted students to have that sense of places nested in a spatial hierarchy
• I decided to repurpose and tweak an old scheme often found in introductory geography textbooks: the “orders of relief” scheme