Oregon Trail - November Post

          The Oregon Trail is the first portion of the westward migration that occurs under the concept of Manifest Destiny.  I have done a simulation for the event, but have been adding and tweaking it every year.  Even this year I have spent the weeks after the fact digitizing the sheets for the assignment.  It will make it even easier because students will just change one number and it'll do all the calculations for them in the coming years.  This year we were still doing it by hand, which them and their calculators (phones) is the most time consuming part of the project.  

Couples are chosen ahead of time so students are not with the same people every project.

First Step: Students choose whether they are the husband or wife out of the couple.  Husband Students identify which profession they have (Popsicle sticks have professions written on it and they draw it from the cup).  Mostly the boys of the groups are husbands, but we have some same gender groupings due to class numbers and some girls who refuse to be the wife that are husbands.

Second Step: Wives roll a dice to see how many children they have - 1-2 = 4 kids; 3-4 = 6 kids; 5-6 = 8 kids.

Third Step: Name all the children, given them a gender, and an age. (this will impact the weekly consumption of the family)

Fourth Step: Begin Shopping - on day two they are given an estimate of needed resources for a family of four to survive (since no one has a family of four no one can claim favoritism) 

Fifth Step: Begin the Journey

Sixth Step: Starting on week three we start rolling a twenty sided die to see if they were attacked by Native Americans and also start choosing fate cards - rivers, floods, tornadoes, snakes, etc. Plus each week we deduct from their resources their weekly resources.  When they no longer have resources for their family members they begin to die off.  

All of the standard students died this semester.  In the one classes defense they were hit by a tornado and no one rolled where they got to safety before hand.  Some of the Honors students were successful in their endeavor, potentially.  We did not get in as far with the Honors because they had a primary document to complete that the regular students did not have.   Next year with the digital form for the calculations should make this possible still in the Honors class.