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Fix a scrambled computer game featuring three towns that have changed over time.

Times change, and so do places. You are designing a computer game that will show how and why some towns have changed over the years. You use pretend newspaper headlines to describe three places:

• The ghost town Bodie, California (map)
• The American city Miami, Florida (map)
• The Australian city Sydney (map)

You're about to test your computer game when—bad luck!—your computer crashes. A virus mixes up all your headlines.

Don't worry, you can fix everything once you do some research. Look at your city profiles of Bodie, Miami, and Sydney. You'll learn about the histories of the cities and be able to make sense of what happened to them and when.

Now look over these nine headlines, three for each town. Read each one carefully, and then figure out which city it describes and put it in the correct chronological order for that city.

(After you've unscrambled the headlines, you may want to check your answer.)

Younger Xpeditioners: Pretend you lived in your community a hundred years ago. Draw a picture that shows how people used the land at that time. Was there a natural resource (river, lake, forest, coal) that was very important to the community? Is that resource still as important today? Get some older folks to help find stories or images that will help give you an idea of what to put into your picture.

Older Xpeditioners: Create your own time line, starting with the headlines in correct order for the three locations above. Include on the timeline references to significant national or global historical events. You may want to include discoveries, the creation of new inventions or technologies, wars, the birthdates of famous people, migrations of large groups of people, or any other historic items that interest you. You could illustrate the time line with photographs, drawings, or maps if you'd like to.

Parents: The purpose of this activity is not simply to learn historical information or arrange chronologies. It's to convey the idea that people's geographic surroundings influence how they live, how they act, and what they do for a living, and that, in turn, people's actions and desires sometimes alter their geographic surroundings.

Use your own or another familiar community to discuss how a particular location changes over time in terms of function, size, appearance, and significance. Talk about how a variety of events help shape and change communities: Some events are natural, like fires, floods, and earthquakes. Some are political, ranging from local legislation to revolutions or wars. And some are economic, such as boom times or the Great Depression.

If possible, talk to elderly residents who might have interesting stories to share about the changes they've seen in the area. Also, local historical societies often print accounts of communities, especially in connection with a community's anniversary or other significant milestones.