About the End of Year Project

💭 Essential Question: How has globalization affected people and places around the world?

The Create a Nation Project provides students with an opportunity to apply the geographic knowledge and disciplinary skills they have developed throughout the course. Students create a fictional nation and make decisions about its physical geography, population, migration, places and culture, economy, global connections, and environmental challenges. Throughout the project, students research real places to inform their decisions and use maps, data, and written explanations to show how the different characteristics of their nation are connected. The project culminates in a showcase where students present their nation and explain how geography shaped its development.

Throughout every lesson of the project, students address Standard 6.2: Analyze how the environment and physical geography shape human behaviors and identities. This standard serves as the central thread of the project as students consider how physical geography influences where people live, how populations move, how places and cultures develop, how economies function, how nations connect through trade, and how people respond to environmental challenges.

Additional course standards addressed will vary based on the location students choose for their fictional nation and the decisions they make throughout the project. Because many course standards are organized by world region, students will apply the standards connected to the region in which they locate their nation. This allows students to revisit relevant regional content while applying geographic concepts and disciplinary skills in a new context.