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Community Playground Survey Level: Middle --- Content: Social Studies |
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Mr. Avellaneda’s middle grade social studies class was studying local government. As one strategy for sensitizing his students to local policy issues, Mr. Avellaneda had the students access the local newspaper online each day and discuss stories that they found interesting or compelling. One story that quickly made it to the top of everyone’s list was a story about a local town councilman, Mr. Betancourt, who had been successful in applying for a grant from a local foundation that was providing money for community playgrounds. These playgrounds would provide both play equipment for children and a fitness circuit for both children and adults. Mr. Avellaneda’s class decided to get involved. Through email, they contacted the councilman and offered to assist him in gathering information that might help him to decide where to place the playgrounds. Mr. Betancourt was pleased with the offer. Teams of students brainstormed lists of places they felt the playground should go. Mr. Avellaneda collated those lists and, using the Intel Visual Ranking Tool, the students ranked their top choices, giving supporting data as to why they chose the locations they did. The students did some analysis of the factors that should influence the placement of the playgrounds: availability of space, lack of current opportunities, density of potential users, and more. They broke into groups and each group chose one of those factors and devised strategies for assessing that factor. In some cases students identified data sources that could be tapped such as online census data maintained by the city. In other cases they developed items for a survey that they would create online using the website SurveyMonkey. Mr. Avellaneda contacted the local paper and they agreed to do a story on the project and publish the URL to the survey in the paper and provide a link to the survey on their website. One of the questions in the survey would determine the neighborhood in which the respondent lived. Participation in the survey was surprisingly good. Response seemed to be driven in large part by announcements in schools to let parents know about the survey, and that their participation gave them a voice in where playgrounds could be located. Each team gathered the data related to their factor. Mr. Avellaneda required students to first do an individual analysis of the data related to their team’s factor. They were required to summarize those data in a student-friendly spreadsheet and then write a set of findings. These were submitted to Mr. Avellaneda for assessment purposes. The teams then met and prioritized their findings, summarizing them in a group report. Mr. Betacourt was so pleased with the result that he invited the students to a town council meeting to present the report in person. Students used presentation software to summarize and illustrate each section of their findings. Tools for this scenario: |