The Own It! Handbooks are guide books for a transformative after-school, trauma-informed enrichment program. The 21st Century Health  Challenges & Inequities handbook provides  lessons & activities about essential elements of the American health and healthcare system. In 2020, the strengths and weaknesses of American health care were brought powerfully into each home by  the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Like  prior 20th century health crises --the 1918 flu, polio,   AIDS -- COVID-19 represented a fundamental challenge to all Americsans. This Handbook seeks to help us better understand how our healthcare systems can better serve the American people.Own It! also nurtures academic skills, personal growth and leadership. It uses history to connect our past to our future, as part of the Own Your History® (OYH) Collection. But Own It! is not “school” and it differs from traditional approaches to history.  

This class is developed around the concept of disobedient interference within the existing models of production of space and knowledge.
Modeling is the main modus operandi of the class as students will be required to make critical diagrammatic cuts through processes of production in different thematic registers – from chemistry, law and economy to art, architecture and urbanism – in order to investigate the sense of social responsibility and control over the complex agendas embedded in models that supports production of everyday objects and surroundings. Students will be encouraged to explore relations between material or immaterial aspects and agencies of production, whether they emerged as a consequence of connection of mind, body and space, or the infrastructural, geographical and ecological complexities of the Anthropocene. These production environments will be taken as modeling settings.

Photo of a Aerial view of a complex of Long Island highways that provide access to New York City (1946)

After catastrophic flooding in New Orleans destroyed two hospitals, the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System is planning a replacement facility that will incorporate resilience against future extreme events.

This is a seminar course that explores the history of selected features of the physical environment of urban America. Among the features considered are parks, cemeteries, tenements, suburbs, zoos, skyscrapers, department stores, supermarkets, and amusement parks. The course gives students experience in working with primary documentation sources through its selection of readings and class discussions. Students then have the opportunity to apply this experience by researching their own historical questions and writing a term paper.

These 3 lessons are for high ABE/low ASE students at a level D-E Reading level to practice identifying key points in video and text and analyzing the causes and effects of social issues, and identifying solutions to these problems. By watching two short videos and reading EPA materials on the effects of lead exposure and a short article on the specific drinking water crisis in Flint, MI, students will examine key issues, analyze the problem and its causes, identify approaches to solving this problem and ones like it in other locations, and apply this approach to other scenarios that are relevant to their immediate lives.

Students consider the Earth's major types of landforms such as mountains, rivers, plains, hills, canyons, oceans and plateaus. Student teams build three-dimensional models of landscapes, depicting several of these landforms. Once the models are built, they act as civil and transportation engineers to design and build roads through the landscapes they have created. The worksheet is provided in English and Spanish.

The class of CIVE230: Engineering and Sustainable Development have been at it again, learning remotely in Spring 2021. This is the second COVID-19 edition of the course!The course introduces sustainability on two levels: qualitative concepts and background information is covered; and quantitative models which emphasize core engineering methods are applied to sustainability problems. Quantitative methods are derived and applied to air quality, water quality, energy and solid waste. Attention is given to sustainable urban systems, as they apply to both developed and developing countries. Sustainability concepts covering the triple bottom line are also presented, and their applicability to sustainable cities are demonstrated. Students in the course were tasked with making a contribution to an e-book. They were creative and innovative in applying course concepts to cities of their choice and exploring sustainability challenges and innovations. Their sustainability project encouraged them to explore sustainable infrastructure, solutions and technologies in Canada and globally to generate an enriched learning experience and to tie ideas to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges (CEGC).

GEOG 571 explores the relationships between culture and civil security and the process of geographically analyzing social, political, economic, and demographic information to understand human history, institutions, and behaviors. It is an elective course in the Geospatial Intelligence Certificate, the Intercollege Master of Professional Studies (iMPS-HLS), and the Master of Geographic Information Systems degree program that is offered exclusively through Penn State's World Campus. It is also one of the optional capstone courses that leads to Penn State's Postbaccalaureate Certificate in GIS. The course consists of projects, associated readings, and exams.

The course considers the growing popularity of sustainability and its implications for the practice of engineering, particularly for the built environment. Two particular methodologies are featured: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The fundamentals of each approach will be presented. Specific topics covered include water and wastewater management, energy use, material selection, and construction.

How does infrastructure meet our needs? What happens when we are cut off from that supporting infrastructure? As a class, students brainstorm, identify and explore the pathways where their food, water and energy originate, and where wastewater and solid waste go. After creating a diagram that maps a neighborhood's inputs and waste outputs, closed and open system concepts are introduced by imagining the neighborhood enclosed in a giant dome, cut off from its infrastructure systems. Students consider the implications and the importance of sustainable resource and waste management. They learn that resources are interdependent and that recycling wastes into resources is key to sustain a closed system.

This seminar focuses on downtowns in U.S. cities from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed on downtown as an idea, place, and cluster of interests; on the changing character of downtown; and on recent efforts to rebuild it. Subjects to be considered will include subways, skyscrapers, highways, urban renewal, and retail centers. The focus will be on readings, discussions, and individual research projects.

The Economics of Infrastructure is the first video in the Explore Economics animated series. It shows how infrastructure such as roads, bridges, railroad lines, water mains, sewer pipes, and power lines support the operation of an economy.

Learning about sustainability requires systems-thinking and a curiosity to explore. When learning opportunities are created for students so that go beyond the course content by learning from the world around us and from each other, they get so much more out of the course. This e-book has been the project experience that allowed students to explore topics of their choice in cities of their choice!This e-book serves as a contribution by the class for the class, and for the wider UW and engineering community. Have a read through.

This book grew out of a decade of co-teaching a course entitled ‘Infrastructure Management’ at Carnegie Mellon University. Our teaching philosophy was to prepare students for work in the field of infrastructure management. We believe that infrastructure management is a professional endeavor and an attractive professional career. The book is co-authored by two accomplished engineers - each representing professional practice, academic research and theoretical evaluation. Their collective strengths are presented throughout the text and serve to support both the practice of infrastructure management and a role for infrastructure management inquiry and search. Importantly, both co-authors have academic research interests (and a number of research publications) on various topics of infrastructure management. That said, the primary audience for this book is expected to be professionals intending to practice infrastructure management, and only secondarily individuals who intend to pursue a career of research in the area.

The class forms a "Presidential Task Force" for a week, empowered by the president to find answers and make recommendations concerning the future of the national power grid. Task force members conduct daily debriefings with their research team and prepare a report and presentation of their findings for the president, using an actual policy document as a guide. Although this activity is geared towards fifth-grade and older students and Internet research capabilities are required, some portions may be appropriate for younger students.

During this course, we will be exploring basic questions of architecture through several short design exercises. Working with many different media, students will discover the interrelationship of architecture and its related disciplines, such as structures, sustainability, architectural history and the visual arts. Each problem will focus on one of these disciplines and one exploration and presentation technique.

Infrastructures for energy, water, transport, information and communications services create the conditions for livability and economic development. They are the backbone of our society. Similar to our arteries and neural systems that sustain our human bodies, most people however take infrastructures for granted. That is, until they break down or service levels go down.

In many countries around the globe infrastructures are ageing. They require substantial investments to meet the challenges of increasing population, urbanization, resource scarcity, congestion, pollution, and so on. Infrastructures are vulnerable to extreme weather events, and therewith to climate change.
Technological innovations, such as new technologies to harvest renewable energy, are one part of the solution. The other part comes from infrastructure restructuring. Market design and regulation, for example, have a high impact on the functioning and performance of infrastructures.

Students read and evaluate descriptions of how people live "off the grid" using solar power and come to understand better the degree to which that lifestyle is or is not truly independent of technological, economic and cultural infrastructure and resources. In the process, students develop a deeper appreciation of the meaning of "community" and the need for human connection. This activity is geared towards fifth-grade and older students and Internet research capabilities are required. Portions of this activity may be appropriate with younger students.

This class introduces students to the interdisciplinary nature of 21st-century engineering projects with three threads of learning: a technical toolkit, a social science toolkit, and a methodology for problem-based learning. Students encounter the social, political, economic, and technological challenges of engineering practice by participating in real engineering projects with faculty and industry; this semester’s major project focuses on the engineering and economics of solar cells. Student teams will create prototypes and mixed media reports with exercises in project planning, analysis, design, optimization, demonstration, reporting and team building.