Designing Dream Parks! 🎡

Thanks for listening to the tech tools for teachers podcast for each week. We talk about a free piece or two of technology that you can use in your classroom. I'm your host, Shanna Martin. I'm a middle school teacher technology and instructional coach for my district.

And I'm her producer and husband Fuzz Martin. And these intros are always amusing and leave you on an emotional rollercoaster.

Nice two in one.

Yeah. Thank you.

Good work. We are here. We are finishing January and loading into February and it's just kind of drippy outside. So I thought we needed something fun to play around with this week. Yeah. And it's very exciting. It's. Um, using

it is definitely amusing.

So, if you haven't figured it out yet, we're talking about amusement parks today. So I guess I should kind of give us a little backstory as to where this, these two sites came from or how I decided to talk about them early at the school year. I was working with a teacher in my district and she was looking for a way to have her students doing, it was for like an enrichment class and how kids could build in. Planning and amusement park and mapping skills and math skills and physics skills, and kind of combining all those things into. Some inquiry learning along with some fun and gauging physical building of stuff.

Sure. Yeah.

So I, she's like, Hey, do you know anything like not off the top of my head, but I bet I can find you some cool things. So give me a minute.

You're the master at finding these. And

so I found fun things for her. And so I have two sites today, one that kind of builds parks and the other one that is like mapping. So it's a little bit of both and they're both really fun to play around with and they have free versions or free pieces that go with them. My top five cool highlights of these two sites kind of combine, creativity. There's so much creativity that you can do with, designing theme parks and or amusement parks. And, or local parks like baseball parks and, community type parks, things like that. So there's some design and creativity definitely allowed and created in here, planning. It teaches kids planning in the process that everything isn't exactly the same right away. It doesn't happen instantly and you have to like take some time to plan. So it helps with planning the projects. There is problem solving involved for sure. Especially if you give your kids parameters around using these, like maybe you can only have so much space or you can only have so many cool highlights or only so many things that you can do. So you can kind of figure that out, with some like 3d design planning pieces, which is pretty cool. Definitely helps with out of the box thinking and, or problem solving, they kind of go together. There's, it's great for supporting projects that they might physically plan in your class. Then here's like a digital version, or they can plan the digital model and then build it later if they choose to. And it also teaches some mapping skills, but this is not your usual latitude longitude on the world type mapping skills. So it's kind of how to read a map and how we label things and have keys and stuff like that. So. Those things could all be a part of this as well, along with just having some good old fun in the classroom and enjoying yourself.

Yeah, having some entertainment, I'm not going to say amusement, entertainment, there we go.

How many times can we say the word amusement in this episode? Right. We can start tallying them. Ding. Alright, so we're on episode 202. And the first site we are going to talk about comes from Iconograms. So it's education. iconograms. com, and then Usage park, we'll put the link in smartinwi.com along with, if you type in Iconograms amusement park, it comes right up. So either way you can search it. And so they have obviously a paid version to use the tools, but they also have free versions that you can use. And this would be cool if you're going to do it with a class, you could do it on the smart board if you want to, and kind of click and drag, or they can do it in groups if they choose to, they have all kinds of them pre done. So you can kind of click on, you want a festival space. Or an amusement park map or a water park map. Like there's options that you can kind of see, which is cool. And then you can create from scratch, which is where it's kind of neat. They have a whole setup when you go to designing from scratch from either the page on the bottom that says design scratch or try here. And so what they give you is a full blank workspace. And we've talked about some 3D modeling type stuff before, but it's a blank workspace to work from. They've got your tools across the top to move things around. And then a whole collection of toolbar things along the left hand side. And so you can go through and just do shapes. They can add text and labels. But they also have cute little buildings. So you can go through and like, I'm gonna do maybe a festival. So you have to talk to your students about planning if you're gonna do a festival type map. You're going to be planning that in a town or a village or a city. So you'd have to plan how that festival is going to work in a city. So you can drop in buildings and homes and skyscrapers and things like that. You can even, like I picked a residential building and dropped it in. You can then have related images to drop those in on the right hand side. It gives you then options. You can color and change the color of things and make them all beautiful as you choose to. You can add bigger buildings and smaller buildings. So if I'm doing a festival, I obviously would have buildings to work around. It wouldn't just be a giant open space. If you go down a little further, you then on that left hand side have this toolbar of all kinds of cool things. So not only would you have buildings, but you can also add stadium pieces. So if I'm going to build a stadium, I have that as an option and I can put bleachers and things like that in and make adjustments. I can add, They even have like football goalposts and soccer goalposts, and they have basketball hoops, so you can add all the sporting things to your, option within your city, depending on, again, what type of festival. They even have swimmers, like, they have all the things. If you scroll up a little bit for the arena, you can put in an arena with a track. And you can make it bigger or smaller and adjust as you'd like to, the baseball diamonds, they have soccer fields and all kinds of stuff like that. So you can put all those things in as you choose to, along with buildings, they also have, roads, so you can put in roads and then you can choose what type of texture you want your road to have. Again, this is one of those fun 3d designers that you can just. Go down a hole of all kinds of excitement and play around with, if you want to scrap the festival idea and want to do a state fair, they also have barns and they have green space. So I'm swapping out my, uh, My skyscraper going to delete that out and I just put a barn in and now we got a barn because we're going to do a county fair and so you can plan for that. It gives you all the barn things that you'd need all the equipment. And then you could add nature so you can add green spaces and trees. And, orchards and things like that. If you want to, they also have animals. You can add horses and pigs and goats and tractors, and it's gonna be a very cool state fair. I suppose it depends on where you're at in the country and, or what your state fairs look like in Wisconsin. Well, there's cream puffs and there's cheese and there's a lot of milk and there's a lot of animals. So, depending on where you're at, I bet your state fair highlights different things, so you can have kids design that. If you're past the state fair and you want to do something else, they also have industrial options, and things that you can add within buildings, like groceries and, a library. And Walls and roofs. So you can build buildings individually. If you don't like the buildings that they give you, you have options. You can even put semi trucks in if you want to. So you can imagine as you're going through all of these options, if you want to add airplanes and you want to read train tracks and you want to add a boats. Again, it's not just amusement park things. You could actually use this mapping and stuff for a lot of different options. Just the focus today is amusement parks because they have that as an option and it's cool, but you can design so many different things with how this works. Sticking to the amusement park theme, they do have, built merry go rounds. They have, Ferris wheels and they have roller coasters. So you can. Drop a roller coaster in the middle of your County fair. And I bet you would be the most popular County fair in the area.

Yes.

So you have that as an option as well. I don't know if you're clicking and playing. I am

building a road.

Yes. So it's one of those where you kind of get into it and then you start just adding all the things. So. Your students would definitely need some parameters as they're going through building and designing, because you could spend hours building this. They even have bridges, like you put in the golden gate bridge, if you want. I mean, there's just so many things. So you can plan and build and create in the land of 3d. As much as you'd want to, you could have kids theme their parks. They even have Christmas and winter holidays. They have those as options to put into your, designs that you're building along with rivers and all kinds of, different icons and stuff like that. So you have all of these options to build and design a rollercoaster, a theme park. And all of those cool things. And then two things you can sign in with Google. So you have a registration. So if kids have a single sign and they can do that, or you can do your email and a password. So that way they have it. And it's meant for teachers and students. So they do have that set up. That's why you have to go the education version of education of accountograms. So you register and you do have a free account then if you want to do more things and, and officially publish them and all that kind of stuff, then you would have to go through the paid version, but you do have. Quite a few options and things like that if you are a teacher and you can just test it out without creating an account, which I want to kind of highlight too. You can play around with it to see if it's something you want to do with your students before you commit to anything. So you have that too. So check out education, I kind of grams and try out that amusement park and you can design away all of these super awesome.

You can design away the day.

Yes. Like I am

as I play.

Oh, and now you're also going to be rhyming, which is fantastic. So go ahead and theme it, build a theme park and do all the cool things or county fair. And there's just so many options to play around with. So check that one out for some fun with your students and some designing along with that, you could actually pick an amusement park or a county fair or something like that from, let's say 1981.

I, uh, I did that. I just did 1981 and I bet you, I did the same one that you did six flags.

Okay. So there's a little background in this, I suppose I should share. I grew up right next to six flags, right? Right. Not like right next to, but within 25 minutes I grew up in Illinois. And our big amusement park is six flags, great America and gurney, Illinois, shout out to anybody who's listening from gurney and. Large portions of my childhood for at six flags and what's super cool. I guess I should take a half a step back. The website we're going to is theme park brochures. net and it's just theme park. T H E M E park. P A R K brochures, B R O C H U R E S. net and this site's so cool. So what you do, and this is great for kind of teaching mapping beyond the world we're going to find a Map, here's your latitude and longitude, you know, digging through the world. So instead this is theme park maps and brochures from forever, like whenever you can find it. So you can type in an old theme park, something you used to do as a kid, and then it's got digital versions of the maps. So if you search, so I searched as you just did, I think six flags, great America map brochure, they have their map brochures between 1976. And 2024. So if you click on it and you scroll down, it tells you about the park. It's still active. That one's still open. Where it's located, some of the history, the Goliath coaster raging bowl, that was such a thing when I was in high school, everyone had to ride raging bowl, like one of my friends worked on the ride, like it was such a thing. And then you scroll through their table of contents and they have links to all of the brochures and maps. From 1976 and forward, and if they changed it or didn't change it, like they have on there. So, got it. Discover Great America, map from Great America from 1981. And so you can find these brochures. Up to the newer ones and you can click on them. It enlarges them for you and they're the authentic maps like so you can

do all

the things

i'm looking at walt disney world map from 1971 when I just had the contemporary resort and hotel the venetian polynesian village and then Magic kingdom. And there's basically not a lot else there's, you know, the monorail, it shows the monorail. Nice. Yeah. Pretty good. Does it highlight

the rides at all or?

No, this just shows a big castle for magic kingdom. So, but I bet you, if I typed in magic kingdom and it would give us that layout for those years as well.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah. And they also have, like, I typed in Disneyland, not thinking that there's more than one Disneyland. It came up with a dis like. Hong Kong, Disneyland, you can pull up the rides and then the maps from there and you can see the different pieces. It kind of just gives you all like the cool list, all the rides. And so there's just so many fun things to play around with. And if you're teaching mapping skills with your kids. At any grade level. So this is one where you could pull up maps, especially for some of our younger students that are just learning mapping skills and to be able to read a map with a key and find cool elements. And then you could have kids design their own so they can base it on a theme park that exists or they could base it on a like they want to create their own. So what, what do you want to take some ideas from? Cedar point in Ohio was another one that I attended, like a band competition when I was, in high school, good old Midwest. And so Cedar point rides list, got it. You can pull up their maps and again, you can pull up all the different things and you can see all of the different map brochures from 2024 to 19.

Yeah, I'm looking at the Magic Kingdom map from 1971 now, and I see that the dad nap ride Tomorrowland, uh, was, uh, was there then as well, so, uh, I think

the dad nap ride has been there as long as that place has existed,

which, I highly recommend if you're ever looking to take a nap at Disney World, Magic Kingdom, Tomorrowland, it's comfortable, uh, comfortable. It's monotone. It's long. Yeah. It's monotone. It's like 20 minutes long. It's dark. And, uh,

You should probably point out that you were not the one who called it the dad nap ride. No, no,

I wasn't. But

there was another dad that told you that this was the dad nap ride. And then when you got permission to nap, you did.

Yeah. And now I'll let anybody that will hear me know I'm like that dad was to me. So I'm your Disney World mentor for dads.

Nice. Thanks. Kings Island, that's the one in Ohio. That's what I was thinking of Kings Island map.

Yeah,

there you go. Yeah. There's so

many, there's so many

things. Like I'm just down the, like the maps, like, Oh my gosh, I was there. Oh, isn't that cool. Or check out those old roller coasters. Like, it's just really fun. And I know they have digital versions of this, but this is a fun way to dig.

Yeah. I looked up Bay beach and green Bay, Wisconsin, which is just a little. amusement park, and they had that as well and it said in the description

So if nothing else, you can go search some fun history things and, yeah, dig up some old maps of cool amusement parks. It's just a very, fun place to be. Cool site to kind of dig around on and play on. And I think students would have fun finding things because they're so old, but really they're not that old at all.

Right.

Cause we're not that old. So obviously. That's right.

We're not that old. They don't even know.

Cool. Well. For that, there's amusement parks, you can design your own, you can dig through some cool maps, you can find some fun information and inspire all kinds of projects. To me, this would definitely be anything like 3rd grade on up, 4th grade on up. You can dig around and create so many cool things to be honest, especially in this cold, kind of wintry. Unfun type, whether you can design and create. So I suggest you should check them out and have some fun. I can't wait to hear what other people have produced with their kids from them.

Yeah. Maybe yeah. Pull up a map and reproduce it with your,

you can redesign it, you can build it. Yeah. And then try and make it no kind of graph. It would be really cool.

Yeah.

So anyway, thanks for tuning in. This has been the tech tools for teachers podcast. If you ever have any questions, you can find me on blue sky threads, Facebook, Instagram, at smartinwi. And if you want to get more information on the links to the technology discussed in this episode, go ahead and visit smart and wii. com. If you'd like to support the show, please consider buying me a coffee or do visit buymeacoffee. com slash smartinwi or visit smartinwi.com and click on that cute little purple coffee cup. Your donations help keep the show going. New episodes each week. Thanks for listening. Go educate and innovate.

The ideas and opinions expressed on this podcast and the smartinwi website are those of the author, Shanna Martin, and not of her employer. Prior to using any of the technologies discussed on this podcast, please consult with your employer regulations. This podcast offers no guarantee that these tools will work for you as described, but we hope they do. And we will talk to you later, right here on the tech tools for teachers podcast. Thanks for letting me record that.