World of 100

Courses: World Geography and Globalization

Grade Range: 7th-12th grade, ages 12-18

Goal: Students will assess the veracity of the gloabl view and explain the differences in the 'real' world view, with the one they perceive.

Why is this important? Students often have an incredibly skewed vision of the world and global human condition.  Asking the students to first come to terms with the manner in which they see the world and then evaluate why they perceive the global human condition so far from reality.

Steps

1. Distribute the World of 100 Worksheet with blank values:  Make sure that the students are working independently and without consulting online sources, this is really menat to parse out what they perceive, not what they can figure out with a source
2. Create a Google Form for the students to report their data.  The resulting spreadsheet of data will be used in the next step.
3. Unveil the correct answers.  Have students do an initial gut check reflection on the pieces of information where they were most/least 'correct'.
4. Assign students to graph pieces of the information.  In groups I assigned 3 to 4 different graphs for each person to complete.  (One could choose to have the students graph all the data sets, but I felt that the activity did not gain much by pushing that particular endeavor.)
5. For each of the assigned data sets, students also graph the correct answers. 
6. Finally, average the class answers for the assigned data sets and use a bar chart to represent which set of answers had the better grasp of the correct world view.  Students produced bar charts that put the individual, class and correct data next to each other to look for trends.  The wisdom of the crowd seemed to bear itself out, interestingly.
7. Write a one page reflection detailing a number of ideas:

     *Which categories were you most accurate? inaccurate? Explain why you think that was the case.

     *Which of the real/correct answers shocked you the most? Explain.

     *If you were way off course in your predictions, explain why it is that you feel that happened. If you were spot on, explain       why you think that happened.

Resources

If the World were a Village of 100 people

World of 100