Interactive Projects

Overview
In this activity, students will learn about the dangers of drinking and driving, especially as they affect teens. They will visit pages of the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration Web site. One of the pages contains information about the DUI problem and permits students interactively to gather relevant data for their own state. The other offers a short, downloadable movie (.avi) showing the effects of a collision on a crash-test dummy. Students will use the information and/or images as the basis for either a multimedia report or a bar graph summarizing what they have learned.

Objectives

• To learn through moving images and text found at a Web site about the deadly risk of drinking and driving or riding with a driver who has used alcohol.
• To communicate the traffic-related risks of alcohol use to peers by exercising one of two reporting options.

Getting Started
On the chalkboard, write the following "equation": DRINKING + DRIVING = ? Ask students to volunteer a completion. Elicit that drinking under the influence of alcohol--or DUI for short--leads to deadly consequences. Explain that in this activity, students will learn the magnitude of the DUI problem.

Classroom Follow-up
Use a subsequent class period for a DUI education seminar in which students who exercised Option 1 present their reports. The bar graphs created for Option 2 may be arranged on a chalk rail or hung on the wall as a gallery display. If the classroom computer is equipped with a database or charting program, you may ask selected volunteers who opted to do a bar graph to convert their findings into a three-dimensional bar or pie graph. Allow time for discussion of what students have learned and recommendations for ways of curtailing this problem.