The Changing Face of Pennsylvania

Academic Standards

The Changing Face of Pennsylvania

The Changing Face of Pennsylvania includes three activities:

Activity 1: Learning from Aerial Photographs »
Activity 2: Historic Timeline »
Activity 3: Learning About Pennsylvania »

The activities involve skills in using maps, aerial photographs and data to help understand trends and changes. These tools are utilized to communicate graphic interpretation of information through a one-to-one correspondence between places, events and data—portraying them through a visual representation. Graphs, charts and tables of information on population, growth and land use help participants to visualize trends that impact communities, counties and the state. Understanding the trends helps citizens in formulating future actions and decisions.

A series of aerial photographs taken at intervals of 10 or more years of the same location provides an account of changes in the landscape over time. Participants will observe and document the changes caused by growth and development. They can determine the percent of change in developed land and project the possible growth that will occur in the future. Introducing geographic information systems technology (GIS) enhances the activity.

By examining maps of Pennsylvania and of their communities, participants gain an understanding of features of physiographic regions such as geology, topography, land cover, etc. that influence growth and development patterns.

Students develop skills such as observation of a physical space, integrating observations into a unified whole, orienting a consistent viewpoint, scaling (ratio and proportion), using symbols, evaluating content and making predictions.

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