Students begin by reading Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" as an example of how overdevelopment can cause long-lasting environmental destruction. Students discuss how to balance the needs of the environment with the needs of human industry. Student teams are asked to serve as natural resource engineers, city planning engineers and civil engineers with the task to replant the nearly destroyed forest and develop a sustainable community design that can co-exist with the re-established natural area.

HOT JOBS: URBAN DESIGN

Urban designers are in charge of arranging city structures. They design plazas and parks, groups of buildings, and the roads and sidewalks that connect them all.

This is a digital classroom resource for grades 6-12.

Students learn about traffic lights and their importance in maintaining public safety and order. Using a Parallax® Basic Stamp 2 microcontroller, students work in teams on the engineering challenge to build a traffic light with a specific behavior. In the process, they learn about light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and how their use can save energy. Students also design their own requirements based on real-world observations as they learn about traffic safety and work towards an interesting goal within the realm of what is important in practice. Knowledge gained from the activity is directly transferrable to future activities, and skills learned are scalable to more ambitious class projects.

Summary of three-day event for AP Human Geography teachers. Topics included sense of place, location, sequent occupancy, infrastructure development, eminent domain, ethnic identification, urban planning, technopoles; skills such as formal observation, data collection, landscape analysis, speculation and spatial analysis; and processes such as diffusion, urbanization, revitalization, acculturation, immigration, and integration.