What if you could challenge your sixth graders to design an amusement park for children of tomorrow to safely enjoy? With this volume in the STEM Road Map Curriculum Series, you can!

Amusement Park of the Future outlines a journey that will steer your students toward authentic problem solving while grounding them in integrated STEM disciplines. The series is designed to meet the growing need to infuse real-world learning into K–12 classrooms.

This book is an interdisciplinary module that uses project- and problem-based learning. Drawing on their previous experience with amusement parks or carnival rides, students will work in teams to do the following:

• Connect these experiences with a variety of science and social studies concepts, including energy transfer, ratios and rates, technical texts, multimedia communications, historical inquiry, and the influences of technology on society.
• Use mathematics and English language arts to research the background and designs of amusement parks.
• Create blueprints of their models, build and test small-scale prototypes, and develop cost-benefit analyses.
• Design marketing plans and infomercials to promote their models.

The STEM Road Map Curriculum Series is anchored in the Next Generation Science Standards, the Common Core State Standards, and the Framework for 21st Century Learning. In-depth and flexible, Amusement Parks of the Future can be used as a whole unit or in part to meet the needs of districts, schools, and teachers who are charting a course toward an integrated STEM approach.