The Project’s Guiding Question
How safe is the walk to our school, and how can we use geographic evidence to make it safer?
Project Overview
Students investigate the streets, crossings, sidewalks, and public spaces that children use every day on their way to school. They map real routes, record real hazards, and use analysis to determine what makes a route safe or unsafe.
Throughout the project, students act as geographers and urban planners. Their goal is to collect spatial data, understand how the built environment shapes daily movement, and propose realistic route improvements that their municipality could actually implement.
Routes are tested against the range of children who use them, including younger children walking alone, children carrying heavy bags, children pushing strollers, and children with mobility, vision, or sensory limitations.
Final Product
The students will create a Safe Walking Routes Map and Recommendation Package for their school.
The final profile should demonstrate:
- A map of the main walking routes to school, drawn from field data
- Hazard points marked and classified by type and severity
- A safety rating or scoring system designed and applied by the team
- Photographs, measurements, and observations that support each finding
- Geographic explanations of why specific locations are unsafe
- Recommended route changes and infrastructure improvements
- A presentation to school leadership, parents, or local authority representatives
Learning Goals
Students will:
- Read, create, and interpret maps at street and neighborhood scale
- Collect and record spatial data through fieldwork
- Analyze how land use, traffic, density, and infrastructure shape movement
- Apply geographic concepts such as accessibility, distance, and land use conflict
- Evaluate risk using evidence rather than impression
- Design realistic improvements within municipal constraints
- Communicate spatial findings through maps and visuals
- Collaborate on a real community challenge
- Reflect on their role in shaping public space
The Challenge
Students are expected to think like geographers and urban planners, not like people complaining about traffic.
Their responsibility is not to say that the streets feel dangerous. They must go outside, observe systematically, measure, record locations accurately, and explain what they find using geographic reasoning.
Space is never neutral. A missing sidewalk, a blind corner, a parking lot exit, a school gate placed on a main road: each is a planning decision with consequences for a seven-year-old walking alone.
A route also works differently for different children. A curb without a ramp, a path narrowed by parked scooters, a crossing signal that changes too fast: these do not affect every child equally. Teams should test their route against more than one type of user before calling it safe.
When building their map and recommendations, students should continually ask:
- Which routes do children actually use, and why?
- What did we observe, measure, and record at each point?
- What patterns appear when we map the hazards together?
- Which geographic factors explain the problem: traffic volume, road width, visibility, land use, lighting, distance?
- Who uses this space, at what times, and does the route work for all of them?
- Which improvements are realistic given cost, ownership, and existing infrastructure?
- How do we persuade a decision maker using spatial evidence?
Students should avoid recommendations that sound good but ignore how the street actually works. A crossing in the wrong place is not a solution. The goal is a proposal a planner would take seriously.
The PBL Recipe
Ingredients
- Street maps and satellite imagery
- Field observation data
- Traffic and pedestrian counts
- Photographs and measurements
- Student and parent surveys
- Municipal planning and accessibility documents
- Curiosity
- Critical thinking
- Spatial reasoning
- Creativity
- Collaboration
Initiate
The students explore how geography shapes daily life. They examine the concept of walkability and look at how streets, sidewalks, crossings, land use, and traffic influence who can move safely and who cannot.
They study the school’s surroundings on maps and satellite images before going outside. Then they take a first observation walk around the school gates and nearby streets, noting what they see without measuring yet.
This phase concludes with a Project Kickoff, where each team selects one route or one focus area:
- A specific approach route to the school
- School gates and drop-off zones
- Crossings and intersections
- Sidewalk quality, width, and continuity
- Visibility, lighting, and time-of-day conditions
- Each team presents a short pitch explaining the area they chose and why it matters.
Plan
The students design their fieldwork. They decide what data they need, which tools they will use, and how they will record location accurately. Methods may include mapping apps, GPS coordinates, printed base maps, traffic counts, timed observations, sidewalk width and slope measurements, photo documentation, and surveys of younger students or parents.
They define what “unsafe” means in measurable terms and build a simple scoring system before they go into the field. This is the step that separates evidence from opinion. The scoring system should account for the different children who use the route, not just the average walker.
Each team produces a work plan with roles, a timeline, a data collection protocol, safety rules for fieldwork, and success criteria.
Execute
The students go into the field and collect data along their route.
They map hazard points, record measurements, photograph conditions, and count traffic and pedestrian flows at relevant times. They log temporary obstructions as well as permanent ones, since parked cars, bins, and scooters block paths daily even where the infrastructure is sound.
Back in class, they plot everything on a shared map and look for patterns.
They then explain their findings geographically. Why does this corner produce conflict? What land use generates the traffic? Where does the route break down for a small child?
Based on the evidence, each team designs a realistic improvement: a rerouted path, a relocated crossing, a change to drop-off flow, a signage or lighting plan, a curb ramp or sidewalk repair priority list. Each recommendation must point back to a specific data point on the map.
Deliver
The students present the Safe Walking Routes Map to an authentic audience: school leadership, parents, the student council, a municipal traffic engineer, or a local council representative.
They explain the routes, the hazards, the data behind each finding, and the improvements they recommend. They defend their priorities and answer questions about cost, feasibility, and impact.
The presentation should include the map itself as the central artifact, supported by photographs, charts, and a short written recommendation summary.
Close
The students reflect on the project and evaluate how geographic thinking changed what they see on an ordinary street. Reflection topics include:
- What surprised them during fieldwork
- Which hazards they had walked past for years without noticing
- How the data changed their initial assumptions
- Where their scoring system worked and where it failed
- What they would measure differently next time
- What it takes to actually change public space
Final Dish
Serves
