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It’s a Wild Ride: A Roller Coaster Design Project
It’s a Wild Ride | Supporting Success
Designing Interdisciplinary Units: Synopsis of Team
Units
The team sends out a parent letter at registration explaining each of the interdisciplinary units.
Excerpt from a parent letter:
Welcome to your team, the Loco Ochos!
We are looking forward to a great year filled with many activities, learning, and fun! We have
four interdisciplinary units planned. In the fall we will begin with a unit titled, “We are nuts
about you!” This unit focuses on team building and integrates academic goals for each
subject. The unit ends with an orienteering field trip (September 16th) in which students can
test their skills. The other units include:
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Get a Clue! (Grab your magnifying glass and solve a crime)-September 23rd-October 25th
Won’t you be my Neighbor? (Students sell the ideal house)-January 22nd-February 26th
It’s a Wild Ride! (Students set out to save an amusement park facing bankruptcy)-March 31stMay 9th
Our first unit centers on the novel, The Acorn People by Ron Jones, and is about a group of
kids at a summer camp for handicapped children. The kids in the novel embark on an
adventure which requires teamwork, acceptance of others, capitalizing on others strengths
instead of weaknesses, and navigation skills. These are themes we like to address at the
beginning of the year. We have incorporated the academic skills involved in orienteering to
culminate the unit (degrees, measurement, scale, earth as a magnet, early explorers, journal
writing, and of course, The Acorn People). The unit culminates with our students trekking
through the South Hills of Idaho and completing an orienteering course in groups with
compasses or GPS.
The second unit, “Get a Clue”, requires students to use math and science skills to solve a
crime. In Social Studies students investigate the judicial system and take their case to court.
The focus is on mystery reading and debate (persuasive writing backed by research and the
experiments done in math and science) in language arts.
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” is the third unit and explores the study of housing. Energy
conservation and conversions, geometry, cost analysis, scale, measurement, settlements
compared through history and descriptive writing are a few of the academic topics covered in
this unit. Students design and sell a house as the culminating project.
It's a Wild Ride is an extended interdisciplinary project that studies roller coaster design in
science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts classrooms. Students learn and apply
laws of motion, slope and linear equations, research, and technical reading and persuasive
writing. As the five-week project unfolds they move from learning content-specific knowledge
and skills to applying what they learn in a group design task. Ultimately, students must
convince a theme park to accept their group's design through persuasive presentations.
We intentionally leave breaks between units to address the standards that are not taught
through our units. This achieves a balance between project-based learning and other types of
learning that are also valuable.
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