Mass Transit Living Lab
TeachEngineering lesson contributed by the civil and environmental engineering department, Colorado School of Mines.
A companion lesson for grades 6-10 from the California Academy of Sciences, Building Better Buses, focuses on alternative fuels and improving energy efficiency in public bus systems. Or play “Gridlock Buster,” the University of Minnesota’s traffic engineering game, with related K-12 lessons.
Summary
In this series of four activities, students in grades 9 to 12 analyze real-world traffic data to evaluate the efficiency of a section of a public transit system and suggest design improvements. They then evaluate whether the changes make positive impacts on the system’s performance. Note: This lesson uses Denver’s FasTracks Living Lab, a web portal to interactive train traffic data for a major metropolitan city, so students need access to computers and the Internet. Click HERE for FasTracks main website.
Grade level: 9-12
Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes or two 50-minute class periods
Engineering Connection
Transportation engineers are responsible for designing and operating the systems that deliver people and goods, including rail, buses, airplanes, trucks, highways, and roads. They aim to design efficient systems that move people and goods quickly, safely, and cost-effectively.
Learning Objectives
After this lesson, students should be able to:
- Suggest design improvements and evaluate whether the changes make positive impacts on the transit system performance.
- Evaluate whether a particular section of a transit system is functioning in an efficient manner and whether it is meeting design requirements.
- Work with real-world data, prepare and interpret graphs, analyze various scenarios, and develop creative solutions to existing problems.
Learning Standards
Next Generation Science Standards
- Use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints on interactions within and between systems relevant to the problem.
International Engineering and Technology Educators Association
- Optimization is an ongoing process or methodology of designing or making a product and is dependent on criteria and constraints.
- Quality control is a planned process to ensure that a product, service, or system meets established criteria.
- Requirements of a design, such as criteria, constraints, and efficiency, sometimes compete with each other.
Common Core Mathematics Standards
- Measurement & Data: Weigh the possible outcomes of a decision by assigning probabilities to payoff values and finding expected values.
Introduction/Motivation
The west corridor of the Mass Transit Living Lab citywide transit system may not be operating as effectively as it could be. Passengers want to be reassured that taking the train to work is better for them than driving their cars.
Conversely, the owners of Living Lab (the city) want to be sure the trains are providing the required passenger service in a cost-effective manner.
The city wants to hire you to work as engineering teams to assess the west corridor and determine if it is meeting design requirements. And if not, the city wants your teams to suggest and test some improvements to fix the system.
As an introductory activity, have students brainstorm ideas. Ask students these questions:
- What do you know about flow rates?
- What are examples of everyday situations in which it would be important to understand flow rate?
Lesson Background and Concepts for Teachers
Design Criteria: Whenever engineers are hired to develop new products (such as voice recognition software), design and build new structures (such as the Chunnel) or improve the day-to-day operations of organizations or processes (such as the flow of people at DisneyWorld), the first thing they do is determine the criteria for a successful design.
FasTracks Living Lab: Teachers need to have a fair working knowledge of the Mass Transit Living Lab (http://www.teachengineering.org/livinglabs/fastracks/) before implementing this lesson in the classroom. The brief online user’s guide helps to provide a better understanding of the Lab; however, the best way to learn is just to poke around! We recommended that you work through this lesson and its activities before implementing them in your class.
Associated Activities
- Mass Transit Living Lab: Establish the Design Criteria – Students learn about design criteria by determining what functionality the trains on the west corridor must meet to satisfy customer and owner needs.
- Mass Transit Living Lab: Graphing the West Corridor Data – Students learn about graphical analysis of data to analyze flaws in a transit system’s design. They evaluate factors such as ride time, wait time, and percentage of train capacity.
- Mass Transit Living Lab: Analyze the Data – Students quantitatively analyzing real-world transit data, identifying problems with the current design based upon their earlier observations and experiences in activities 1 and 2.
- Mass Transit Living Lab: Improve the System – Students identify possible solutions to the design problems that the existing west corridor faces, combining what they have learned from the three previous activities to come up with possible solutions.
Watch how school bus routes are planned in St. Cloud, Minnesota:
Lesson Closure
A great way to end this lesson is to have a class discussion about 1) what was wrong with the west corridor operation, and 2) the various recommendations of the different teams. It is beneficial to have peer-review and constructive criticism of student work – it is instant feedback and from a source other than the teacher.
Assessment
Grade the intermediate homework, final presentations or final reports. In addition, give students a scenario in which traffic demand increases substantially (such as before or after a Sunday downtown football game) and ask them to design changes to the system.
Lesson Extension Activities
The extensions are limitless. Have students perform similar analyses for other trains, stations, and routes, or collect data on school bus routes and recommend improvements.
Other Related Information
This lesson is designed around the Mass Transit Living Lab, a real-time simulation of FasTracks—a real, high-speed rail transit system in metropolitan Denver, Colorado, as an example for analyzing data about how a light rail system works.
Companion lesson (Grades 6-10): Building Better Buses, from the California Academy of Sciences, focuses on alternative fuels and improving energy efficiency in public bus systems.
Contributors
Mike Mooney; Stuart Fehr
Supporting Program
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Colorado School of Mines
Acknowledgements
This curriculum was created with support from the National Science Foundation. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policies of the National Science Foundation, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.
Filed under: Class Activities, Grades 9-12, K-12 Outreach Programs, Lesson Plans
Tags: Class Activities, data, FasTracks, Grades 9-12, graphs, Lesson Plan, mass transit, NGSS, route, Systems Engineering, traffic engineering, transportation engineering, urban planning
