Renaissance Faire Elf Using Cell Phone. (Image by Zoomar). The caption for the photo is priceless, 'I just want to state for the record that a cell phone at a Renaissance Faire is anachronistic and wrong. Being an Elf, however is 100% historically accurate.'
What are the fundamental needs of life (as we know it)? Energy, water, living space and stable internal conditions. These are physical needs of all organisms from bacteria to plants to mammals. Humans share these needs too, and this was one of the things we talked about in natural world this cycle. However, in social world studies we also discussed how people have psychological needs that, as far as we can tell, are different from those of single celled organisms: celebration, community, entertainment, and, among other things, what my students call understanding, which includes religion and spirituality.
My technophilic students also interjected that we, humans, have a need for electronics.
Electronics? My first thought was that they were being facetious, and they may have well been. But as we talked about all the other needs during our synthesis discussion last Friday I began to realize just how fundamental electronics have become to life as we know it.
Electronics are tied into the way we meet those fundamental physical needs. Organizing shipping and distribution of food requires complex scheduling software and databases. The operation of the pumps that extract our groundwater and deliver it to our houses are controlled by microcontroller. With MRI’s and computerized records our health and well-being (maintaining those stable internal conditions) are increasingly influenced by electronic technology. And in our homes, the elegant knobs and dials of thermostats on furnaces and ovens are giving way to smooth if inelegant digital displays.
Even our understanding of the world we live in, of the effects of global climate change for example, is based predominantly on sophisticated computer models and confirmed by computerized satellite systems (see NCAR for example).
So have we reached the point where electronics are a fundamental need of society, and how long will it be before we as individuals become inseparable from our electronics devices? Are we all cyborgs now? And the ultimate question: Should we be teaching more electronics in middle school?
The SimCity game is a wonderful model for urban planning. My class is using it to try to tie together the lessons on the Needs of People and the Themes of Geography.
I gave the small groups the game, two hours, and required them to take notes on why they made the choices they made.
SimCity regional view.
What we did
The game starts at the Region view, where you choose the location of the city. I was enthused to see the groups almost instinctively go for a location with good access to water. Of course almost all the places you can found a city are on a river or ocean, but more than one student specifically mentioned the water access as a reason for their choice.
To have them better think about the region, I also asked the students to think about, and report, on where in the world they thought their city might be, based on the topography and the vegetation. Most proposed the eastern U.S. seaboard.
After choosing a location the students could “terraform” it by raising mountains, making valleys, sculpting beaches and more. Some groups needed to be chivvied to move on, after all, they only had one two hour session to complete the assignment.
Then they got into the heart of the game, Mayor Mode (the terraforming session is called “God Mode”). The urban planning model is based on the land-use zoning strategy used by many, but by no means not all, U.S. cities. You have to mark cells on the city’s grid for residential, commercial or industrial/agricultural use. Then, if you’ve provided utilities and a transportation system “developers” will autonomously start to build houses, businesses and industry in these zones.
The great city of Da Hood. Note the different areas for urban, commercial and industrial development, and the seaport on the river.
Playing on “Easy”, the mayoral advisers would regularly pop up to suggest new amenities, like schools, police stations and parks that would attract more people to the city.
And students had to make choices. One of the first, for example, was about what type of power to provide their city. Coal plants are cheap but dirty, while windmills produce a lot less power so you have to build a lot of them.
A Little Discussion
The game worked remarkably well as part of the curriculum. SimCity is a potentially addictive game, the plea, “I really need to stop,” was heard repeatedly as I was trying to get the last group to come to our discussion. Yet, two hours was enough for students to get the gist of the game and think about its implications for geography. The final cities were not perfect (at least one was designed to be dysfunctional) and most of them were running a serious deficit, but when it came time to present, students were able to flesh out our information on the lessons quite nicely.
The game is also easy enough. The game’s internal model is quite sophisticated, but there’s enough in-game advice, that it took just some initial guidance about the basic premise of zoning, for students unfamiliar with the game to play it effectively. Some students were better prepared at the start than others. Some had played similar games in the past and one student had even read the instruction booklet that came with the game CD, but they were all able to get cities up and running in the allotted time.
Technical Difficulties
We’re a Mac school, but SimCity does not have a version that works with modern macs, so I had to use my old laptop that has Windows. That computer is a Mac that it uses Boot Camp to boot to Windows, and, perhaps for this reason, the first group that tried to use it had it crash on them a few times at the beginning of their game. They gave up and created their city in our sandbox, which turned out great in the end because it gave them more flexibility in the structures they could create and some interesting differences in perspectives from the game based presentations. I’ll post more about that later.
In Conclusion
I like the game because it lets the students provide the infrastructure while the game engine/model tests the infrastructure to see it if works and “predicts” development and population. The Needs of People and Themes of Geography contexts were useful ways of getting students into the game but struggling to get the city to work helped fill in a lot of things that students had not thought of previously.
One of those things was people’s need for safety. In our post-game discussion, safety from crime and from nature came up as additional needs of people we had not discussed. Successful cities in the game need police stations, and students had apparently been thinking hard about the array of natural disasters they could rain down on their cities when the assignment was over.
The Taj Mahal, soccer fields and a skate-park (of which some of us were inordinately proud) met the needs of citizens for recreation and understanding.
Finally, students presented their cities while Ms. Ann DeVore from the Deargorn Heights Montessori Center was observing the classroom. Ann is an enthusiastic user of SimCity. Her middle school uses it the initial part of the Future City competition, which is something I’d very much like to get my group involved in as soon as I can wrangle some technical advisers.
I’m not terribly partial to the Island of Podiatry exercise where student produce a map of physiographic features, gulfs, archipelagos, plateaus and so on, starting with the outline of their feet. However, in considering alternatives I was thinking about how it could be made even more real, more tactile. My first thought was of having them sculpt the topography out of modeling clay, but then I realized that this would be a great use for our sandbox.
The weather’s cooled down a bit in the last week, but it should still be warm enough for students to want to be outside. All I’ll need to do is level the box (though this might be no small feat since it’s filled with sand), add about ten centimeters of water, and have them shape the island from their Island of Podiatry map. I’ll also probably need them to decide whose map they want to model.
[googleMap name=”Lake Titicaca” description=”Example of a lake.” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”7″ mousewheel=”false”]Lake Titicaca, Peru[/googleMap]
Cuing off of a comment by EV from Somewhat Up in the Air, I finally found what I think is a decent alternative to the Island of Podiatry map exercise. Instead of them altering a map of their feet into a series of topographic features, I’m having them do a treasure hunt using Google Maps. The assignment is pretty straightforward, and students can choose either option:
Use Google maps to capture images (Apple-Shift-4) of the features on the topographic features list. Put all the images into a PowerPoint or similar presentation. You may choose features from anywhere in the world so make it interesting.
In addition, I’d like to set up one of those games where they get extra points if the location they choose for a particular feature is not the same as someone else’s.
Another addendum to this, which would make a great extension to the project, is to allow students to enter the geographic coordinates of their features on a webpage that then plots all the similar features on a Google Map. It shouldn’t be too hard to do but would take some time as I’d have to set up and program its own website for the project along the lines of the Mariner AO site described here.
Lunch on Wednesdays follows our main block of Student Run Business time. It’s after they’ve delivered pizza, prep-ed for a week of bread, completed finance and its reports, prepared and processed order forms, and sorted out the plants.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve started having my students discuss the business over lunch (including finance reports presentations) and it’s turning into a regular board meeting.
Today they started assigning seating.
We usually sit around two long tables set end to end, with the main supervisor on one end and myself at the other. Today the main supervisor started laying out plates and positions. Pizza supervisor to his right, bread to his right, finances one down from bread and sales across from finances. Everyone else could find their own spot.
I was a little surprised at this unprompted expression of hierarchy. Pizza is our most involved part of the business and the core of the the enterprise so its supervisor, P., has a very important post. She was placed on the right hand of the main supervisor!
I asked the main supervisor why he did it. He said, “I don’t know.” I even had to explain the meaning of the term, ‘right hand “man”‘.
It ended up with the supervisors at one table and everyone else (and myself) at the other.
Except for the plants supervisor. Plants have been going slowly, lately, including some seedling failures. The plant supervisor sat all the way down the table, next to me.
…
I can feel it in my bones that there are some interesting lessons in all this. From organizational structure to non-verbal communication.
But since we’re dealing with positions around a table, and we’ve been talking about the importance of place in geography, the best context to discuss this right now might just be one of the importance of geography and place in the interactions among people.
So now I want to use video games in the classroom. My head of school is politely opposed. I argued it would be useful for integrating our work on the themes of geography and needs of people. She allowed me to pick up a copy of SimCity if I could come up with some sort of evidence that it actually works. Quantitative evidence. You’ll be hearing more about that in a later post.
However, while I was shopping I also picked up a cheap copy of Civilization IV because while it also goes into city building, it does so from a more regional perspective. I’d played older versions of the Civilization games before (a long time ago in a galaxy far away) so I was somewhat favorably familiar with how it works.
Unfortunately, the fourth version is too sophisticated. There are so many variables to deal with that it would be difficult to use on the relatively short time-scale that I want students to spend on this. Whereas before, founding a city on a river gave very obvious benefits (a bonus in the productivity of the land around the river), there are so many different types of land surfaces and changes that can be done to them that the advantages of the river, while still there are much less obvious.
On the plus side, if students find the game enjoyable, succeeding will take a lot of historical research and understanding the geography of cities. It would also take a lot of time, not necessarily wasted time, but a lot of time nonetheless.
Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.
If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.
Terrain view shows the vegetation changes very nicely.The physiographic regions really stand out with the continent-scale satellite view.
Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.
Transportation networks are an essential component for understanding the geography of a city.The rivers are a little more visible in terrain view.
Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.
Highway bypass loops are often significant demographic boundaries.
As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.
Human effects on the urban environment are very different from agricultural regions.
At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.
You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.
Street view of a shotgun house.
Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.
So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.
Graphic organizer for Memphis geography showing examples from all the five themes.
Catastrophic failure of one of our ovens! Last year when we started up the bread business, we bought two counter-top ovens within a couple of weeks of each other. They needed to be extra-large to fit two loaves of bread each, which made them a little hard to find. We got a EuroPro oven first, and when we found that it worked pretty well, we went back to try to get another. But just a week later, the store was out of stock and that type of oven could not be found in the city of Memphis or its environs.
Instead we got a GE model. The price was about the same, as was the capacity. We quickly realized that the GE was quite the inferior product. The temperature in the oven was never the same as what was set on the dial. Our bread supervisor at the time ran a calibration experiment, the results of which you can see above, so we still managed to use the oven. Only this year, three weeks into the term, it conked out.
We sold at least one underdone loaf before we realized what had happened, and received a detailed letter in response (which our current bread supervisor handled wonderfully in his own well worded letter). Fortunately, we have found a newer version of our EuroPro oven, which seems to work quite well.
I like the oven calibration exercise. It was a nice application of the scientific process to solve an actual problem we had with the business. Though I know it’s not quite the same, I like the idea of doing annual oven calibrations just to check the health of our equipment and help students realize that the scientific process is a powerful way of looking at the world, not just something you do in science.
