Wonderworld A Dinosaur's Neighborhood Geographic Groceries Activity Index

<< Even the sun bows to Pharaoh Khafre, setting at the foot of his pyramid on the Giza plateau. Photograph by Kenneth Garrett

Design a theme park devoted to great moments in architecture and engineering.

Big Ears Entertainment needs you. They have the money, material, and mousepower to build Wonderworld, but no one's managed to come up with that perfect, oh-so-cool design that will entice millions of people to come to the park.

Your design for Wonderworld needs to do two things. First, it should expose visitors to engineering and architectural triumphs from different times and places. Second, it should group the attractions in some sort of order (such as chronological or geographical). To get you started, the president of Big Ears gives you a list of potential attractions and brief profiles of six famous wonders.

Make your design as simple or elaborate as you like. A few options: find pictures of wonders and paste them onto a sketch, craft detailed plans on graph paper, or create a computer model.

Xpedition Xtra: Once Wonderworld is built and visitors (we hope!) start touring, they'll probably look at different wonders and ask themselves, "Why did someone build this?" You might want to hire guides to dress like the builders and offer some answers. The reasons will vary: religion, civic pride, economics, aesthetics, and more. Yet the builders of each wonder believed it would somehow enrich their world.

Younger Xpeditioners: Use clay to depict one of the attractions you selected for Wonderworld.

Older Xpeditioners: Turn your talents toward other things such a theme park would need: logo, slogan, ads. These need to persuade potential customers that Wonderworld is worth their time.

Parents: Wonders of architecture and engineering offer more than a chance to admire human ingenuity. They are also windows into the lives of the people who built them. The abrupt color shift a third of the way up the Washington Monument, for instance, tells astute observers that something disrupted construction. That "something" was the Civil War. The Great Wall testifies to ancient China's terror of invasion. And the project's immense scale suggests a huge labor force.

Are there wonders near you? A visit could be a great way to use geography to illumine both science (how did they do this?) and history (why did they do this?)