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Imperial Exploration Unit: Colonial Exploration Of North America

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Throughout the entire Colonial Exploration Unit, I learned a great deal about colonial expansion and economy. One of the first things we learned was about the Vikings and their early exploration of North America. Then we started discussing maps, more specifically longitude and latitude. We learned how the Roman scholar, Claudius Ptolemaeus, also known as Ptolemy, was the first to propose the idea of a grid system for the entire planet (Rosenburg). This was later known as lines of longitude and latitude (Rosenburg). Shortly after we finished discussing maps, we started to talk about a colonial economic system known as "mercantilism". In this system, kings try to increase their countries exports while decreasing their imports ("Mercantilism"). …show more content…

In the project, we used Google Slides to create an interactive story about colonial exploration. Manav and I worked together to create a story about Marco, the captain of the Spanish caravel, "The Electra". We chose the ship to be a caravel since we learned that Prince Henry the Navigator designed them to travel long distances ("Caravel"). With two or three masts and a rounded bottom, caravels were fast, this made them the ideal ships to travel to the New World with ("Caravel"). In addition to this, we also learned about navigation tools such as the magnetic compass. The magnetic compass is used by navigators to determine the direction they're heading in ("Compass"). It was first used by the Venetians in 1274 and consists of a magnetic needle and a compass card ("Compass"). The magnetic needle always points to the North Pole, and by using the North Pole as a reference point, explorers were effortlessly able to determine the direction they are heading in

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