Phase 2: Design
Infrastructure & utilities
These activities help students to consider the networks that connect a building. They emphasise the importance of sustainable transport within a community and help students to appreciate the impacts of providing infrastructure and utilities.
- Deliver these activities within a double session, so that you can include a tour of your campus using a plan of the utility connections.
- You will need site plans and online mapping for this task.
Explore the utilities and infrastructure that connect your school or college
Introduction
- Use What connects a building? with students.
- Get them to imagine laying these utilities again for your school or college. How much disruption would this cause, and why?
Main activity
- Using Sustainable transport, look at a plan of your school or college – online aerial photography will do.
- How is it connected to roads and paths etc?
- In groups, students use printouts of online maps to improve transport connections.
- They could change the size of car parks – what would they replace them with?
- Groups present back their ideas.
Extension – double period
- Use Explore your site and a site plan to take a guided tour of your campus.
- Can students find each utility that is marked on the plan?
- How would these affect future construction work on site – what would designers and site workers have to think about?
Plenary
- Gather ideas from each group – you can create a chart on the board.
- Discuss which jobs are of interest.
(You can use the communication questions from Who designs a large department?)
Differentiation
Easier/Level 1:
Get students to find out how each utility is connected to their home. Miss out the site tour unless you are sure your students will learn from it.
Harder:
Students consider the cost of connecting to utilities and the work required to raise pylons or poles, lay cables in trenches etc.
Answers: What connects a building?
Industrial park:
major roads for transporting materials, goods and people in and out; power for industrial equipment.
Power station:
site away from housing; railway line for transporting oil, coal or nuclear fuel.
Shopping centre:
road access for customers and deliveries; site close to major housing areas.
Answers: Sustainable transport
Public transport can be more good for reasons that include:
communities:
less traffic congestion; safer roads; chance for people to mix
environment:
lower particle emissions (cleaner local air); fewer carbon emissions (lower contribution to global warming); less need for oil, a non-renewable resource.