Creating A STEM-Themed Amusement Park (CAMS AP) STEM Integrated Project
CAMS AP is an interdisciplinary project that is designed to have teams of students working together to design, promote, market and create a STEM-themed amusement park. The culminating activity in the project is an investor fair where students will try to convince potential investors to fund their theme park project. This project is meant to be completed over a 4-6 week course of study.
By the end of this project, students will have developed and utilized a variety of skills including:
written and oral communication, research, problem-solving, collaboration, and creating solutions to real-world problems.
In the engineering section of this project, students explore the types of engineering careers applicable to an amusement park. The relevant careers they discover may include environmental engineers, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and safety engineers. They experiment to discover the scientific principles behind amusement park rides, design their own amusement park attraction, and build a model of it for presentation and display.
In addition to the CTE/STEM focus of the project lessons, educators will find academic lessons in English Language Arts, Social Science, Art, and Japanese that supplement the primary core area of study.
For the English Language Arts portion of this project, students design an advertising campaign for their STEM-themed amusement park. This includes coming up with an enticing name for their park, writing a catchy slogan, creating a commercial, and designing print advertising.
The role of Social Science comes into play as students develop a business plan for their amusement park enterprise and pitch it to a panel of potential investors.
To address Art, students incorporate the concept of STEM into their architectural designs and illustrate the main street of their amusement park using one-point perspective.
Students apply their Japanese language skills by playing the part of travel agents who are promoting their new amusement park to tourists from Japan.
This unit is brought to you by Nancy Brown (CTE), Matt Gold (History), Renee Brown (English Language Arts), and Ami Nishiyama (Art and Japanese) with support from the CTE Online curriculum leadership team and detailed coordination provided by the Course Team Lead Mina Greas.
