ATS3552-APG4552: Remote Sensing of the Environment

50% prac reports
50% exam

Do not do this unit if you are colourblind, because well, I don't think it's possible, really. If you are poor at discriminating between different colours, you are going to have a hard time.

This was a pretty cool unit, for the most part, pretty cruisy. Prac marks are easy to get, and make sure you get them because the exam is on the tougher side. I didn't go to the lectures because I had a clash, but I heard from a reliable source that they are a mixed bag. Sometimes there are in class exercises that Xuan gives out, but you can easily do them at home (I did).

In terms of learning content, you don't do that in the lectures, you are supposed to watch the videos online at home before class. The videos vary in length, sometimes they're an hour, sometimes longer, and I couldn't really watch them in one sitting. Xuan's accent takes getting used to if you haven't listened to him before. If you're stuck with anything he's very helpful though and won't give up on explaining things until you get it. There are weekly quizzes to check your progress with, which is helpful. You mark them yourself so they're not graded.

I liked the pracs. The first few were a bit 'meh', in that you mostly end up staring at pictures of things and saying 'this is an aerial photo of an amusement park, this is a golf course, this is a shopping centre', etc. Really a lot of the pracs involve staring at pictures and figuring out what they are. But afterwards, you get to do some pretty cool stuff on the computer with regards to mapping and so on. Pracs are easy marks, don't waste them.

I guess the exam was mostly pretty fair, but a bit tough. There was a review lecture and an explanation of the format of the exam, with some sample questions. However an entire exam paper would have been nice.

Xuan Zhu

No

3.5 out of 5

Yes

From the unit guide -- Lillesand, T.M., Kiefer, R.W. and Chipman, J.W. (2008) Remote Sensing and Image
Interpretation, Sixth Edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
OR
Jensen, J.R. (2007) Remote Sensing of the Environment: An Earth Resource Perspective, Second
Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
TBH I did not do any of the readings.

7 x 3 hour pracs over the semester. I usually finished 1.5-2 hours in, with only one prac taking the full 3 hours.
Weekly 1 hour 'interactive class' (basically a lecture)

sem 2 2014

TBA, probably a D 78