Geography K–10 · Years 3–4

States, territories and neighbours on a real map, with scale-bar distances

Geography (HASS F–6 sub-strand); NSW Geography K–10 (2015) Stage 2 focus area: Places are Similar and Different (The Australian continent; Australia's neighbours), whose content points "location of Australia's states, territories and major cities" and "location of Australia's neighbouring countries" are the exact anchors; reading a printed scale bar is a scale operation, and scale first appears in the Stage 4 maps row of the K–10 geographical tools continuum, while the Stage 2 row names location, direction, distance, map references, spatial distributions and patterns. The bar is used here as the map's own calibration for that Stage 2 distance skill, the continuum is headed "Examples may include:", and the gap is stated rather than covered over.

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The idea

Australia and its neighbours are located by direction and distance, and a printed scale bar turns a string length into kilometres.

What you need

Geoscience Australia Map of Australia (A3 print) with scale bar, one per pair
A classroom atlas page of the South-West Pacific and South-East Asia with a scale bar
50 cm of string, a ruler, a pencil
Sticky dots for the eight state and territory capitals

How to do it

Place a dot on each capital city and label the state or territory. Name the ocean or sea on each side of the continent.
Lay the string from Sydney to Perth along the map, straighten it against the ruler and read the length in cm.
Measure the printed scale bar with the ruler, read the value printed on it, and write down how many km one cm of this print represents. Do not assume a figure: Sydney to Perth alone is 3291 km, so a print of the whole continent on the 42 cm side of an A3 sheet cannot be finer than about 1 cm to 80 km. Convert the string length to km.
Repeat for Sydney to Darwin, and on the atlas page from Darwin to Dili (Timor-Leste) and from Cairns to Port Moresby.
Rank the distances and describe each neighbour's direction from Australia using the compass rose.

What you should see

A labelled map with eight capitals and a distance table in km built from the scale bar. The learner finds that some neighbouring capitals are closer to an Australian city than Sydney is to Perth. Great-circle distances recomputed on 23 September 2026 by the haversine formula with Earth radius 6371.0 km, from these coordinates (Cairns 16.92° S 145.77° E, Port Moresby 9.44° S 147.18° E, Darwin 12.46° S 130.84° E, Dili 8.56° S 125.56° E, Sydney 33.87° S 151.21° E, Perth 31.95° S 115.86° E), give a check for the string method: Cairns to Port Moresby 846 km, Darwin to Dili 722 km, Sydney to Darwin 3149 km, Sydney to Perth 3291 km. A string on a flat map does not follow the great circle, so the class records the difference between its string value and these and relates it to the map projection; the second check is consistency: measuring the same pair twice should agree within 1 mm of string, about 10 km at 1 cm = 100 km.

What changes

This activity lists no variables to change, measure and keep the same.

Common misconceptions

Each of these ideas is wrong, and the activity is a chance to test it.

Countries across the sea are far away because the sea looks empty on the map.
The string length in cm is the distance.

Safety card

Low riskLearners carry it out

Hazards

No hazard is listed.

Controls

No control is listed.

Note

No chemicals or heat are used. The activity is run under the school risk-assessment procedure; RiskAssess (riskassess.com.au) holds templates for school practicals and fieldwork. The NSW Department of Education Chemical Safety in Schools package is not triggered.

Curriculum references

The NSW syllabus outcomes and Australian Curriculum v9 codes this activity supports. They are references, not a verified or complete curriculum alignment.

Geography K–10 Syllabus (2015), NESA; current and taught in 2026, replaced from 2027. The outcome codes are not printed on the NESA landing page for this syllabus, which only links the document, so the url given is the syllabus document itself (geography-k-10-syllabus-2015.docx); the code and its outcome text were read in that document on 23 September 2026.GE2-1 GE2-4
Human Society and its Environment K–6 Syllabus (2024), NESA; implementation from 2027, not yet taught; code read on this page on 22 September 2026HS2-GEO-01
Australian Curriculum v9AC9HS3K03AC9HS3S02

Sources

The pages the author read to write this activity.

All Concept Studio activities