Overview:

This is a web-based project that allows students to use their physical and cultural geography skills to determine the identities of ten actual towns and cities around the globe.

Objectives:

This shows how all the geography skills fit together to accomplish a useful task.

Grade Level: This contest is available, by grade level, to all grades and especially useful to geography.

Time: This will take bits of twelve days that equal about four complete forty-five minute class over a four month period.

Subjects: Science may find the photoperiod part useful and math can be very helpful when calculating day lengths and longitude.

Prerequisites:  This activity takes place in late winter and spring and assumes a basic knowledge of latitude, longitude, physical and cultural geography.

Required Materials

• Atlases, a wall map of the world, and access to the Internet are required.  This is an Internet based unit.  To register to receive the materials go to www.jn-challenge-mclass@learner.org/cgi-bin/jnorth/jn-register  There is no cost to participate.  There is a book covering this and other activities for sale, but it isn’t necessary to participate.

Suggested Procedure:

-Opening: This activity comes from the Annenberg Foundation and is mainly directed to science teachers who are interested in tracking wildlife migrations.  However, the portion discussed here is one in which your students will have to identify ten cities, towns, or settlements around the globe from clues received every Friday from February through early May via the Internet.  You will also receive a lot of e-mails about migrations of butterflies, robins, whales and the like.  Don’t worry; you can ignore them.   You will be competing against all other participants from your grade level.  WARNING: You will not be given the names of the mystery locations until the contest is over.

Before the contest begins, you will be sent a form that can be duplicated so the students can keep track of the clues as they are received.   I begin telling them that we are going to use our geographic skills to compete against the rest or the world.  We will be using clues to determine the names of ten places around the world.  I ask if it is possible to determine the approximate latitude of a place by knowing whether hours of daylight are getting longer or shorter and how fast.  I then hand out the forms and tell them that they must retain the form for three months.  I will not hand out duplicates to kids who misplace theirs.  They must draw their own replacement. 

-Development: On or about the first Friday in February you will receive an e-mail giving the sunrise and sunset times in local time in each of the mystery cities.  It will also be in military or 24-hour form. Review the relationship between time of year, sun angle and hours of sunshine.  Post the times so that each student can copy them into the first line in each of ten charts, one for each city.  I also give them the times for the same date in the Twin Cities, which, at 45 degrees North, provide a good reference.  This is available from the newspaper or the Minnesota Weather Guide calendar.  It will be necessary to review how to calculate hours of sunlight, or photoperiod, since a calculator won’t work (There are only 60 minutes in an hour).  Have them plot the first photoperiods on the graph, a master copy of which is also supplied by the Foundation.  There should be 11 dots of different colors of shapes on the Y-axis of their graph.

Each Friday repeat the procedure with the new data that is provided by e-mail.  As they graph the data for each location remind them that they should not have a jagged line for any city.  If they do, they have made a mistake.  After two to four weeks take some time to discuss what they can deduce from their data.  Are the days getting longer or shorter in each city?  Quickly or slowly?  Does this mean a city is in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern?  Near the Equator or far away?  How do we know?  Have a student go to the large world map and indicate a band in which the city must lie.

On the first Friday after the vernal equinox you will receive the sunrise time in Greenwich, England and the sunrise in Greenwich Mean Time for all ten mystery cities.  You will also receive a step-by-step worksheet on how to calculate longitude from this data.  Review the facts that the Earth rotates 360 degrees in twenty-four hours, hence 15 degrees per hour, hence ¼ degree every minute.  If we calculate how many minutes the sun rose in each location before or after Greenwich, we can calculate East- or West-Longitude to within ¼ of degree.  If your students are math challenged it is good to recruit some help from the math folks in their classes.  Now students can go to the world map and find the correct longitude and a narrow latitude band for each city.  They can begin to create hypotheses for each location.

Shortly after the GMT sunrise times, you will receive physical and cultural clues for each location each Friday.  Have the students write down each clue next to each data block in their packet.  All the clues together are often needed to determine a site.  Give the students a few minutes to discuss whether the clues match the hypotheses.  These clues will come each week until mid-May.  Reserve a library and Internet access day for the last week.  Divide each class into ten teams and assign one site to each team.  They are to make a final decision on their location and be prepared to defend it.  Write the proposed location on the board and have each class discuss the results so that a consensus can be reached.  In the last class have three or four reliable students submit your official guesses in the format provided by the Foundation.

-Closing: On the Friday after the deadline for guesses the actual locations and the winners will be announced by grade level.  This is a good time to congratulate your students on their hard work and discuss what you got right and wrong and why.  If they were quite successful some prizes might be in order.

Differentiation: Pair challenged students with another.  You can also give them the calculations instead of asking them to do their own.

Student Activity Online: Students often find a place like “Ask    Jeeves,” “Google,” or the like helpful in researching some of the clues.  They probably have a favorite by now.

Suggested Assessment: I collect their individual packets and guesses.  They get regular credit for effort: completeness and accuracy of the data and graph.  I give extra credit for each location each individual student got correct.

Extension Activities: For extra credit, any student can make up their own Mystery City.  They have to find day lengths sunrise GMT on the vernal equinox, and geographic clues.  This is particularly good for gifted students.

Credits

Ron Iverson, 8^th grade geography, Central Middle School, Eden Prairie, MN