HAZARD CITY
Updated
01/06/2011
The lucky citizens of Hazard City live on a river a few miles downstream from a volcano, near an active fault. The CD-ROM that comes with your textbook contains all information required to assess certain concerns regarding these (and other) hazards. Some projects have links to the Web for supplementary materials. The My Geosciences site has the same resources.
First, back up your CD-ROM. I burn an image to my hard drive and keep the original in a safe place, and run the projects from my hard drive. Every semester at least one student loses the CD, has it eaten by the dog, used as a discus by a 4-year-old, or stolen from a student computer cluster. These exercises count for a full quarter of your final grade. Students who fail to submit Hazard City projects usually fail the class (do the math. One semester, a student who did all assignments but missed both the midterm and final exam actually passed (with a D).
It appears that Hudson includes only a code for using the online Hazard City resource, and that buying a used textbook requires you to pay extra for Hazard City access.
If you opt for the online version, write down your username and keyword in more than one location!
I suggest you can download the worksheet, edit it so that your choice of the correct responses are clear (deleting all but the best choice is one way) and 'save as' a rich text format document. Attach this document to a Blackboard Message and send it to me. Attachments in .pdf format are greatly appreciated and speed up the grading process.
I suggest you do not wait until the last minute to begin Hazard City. Students who submit just before the deadline tend to score half what students who turn work in several days early score. It pays to get all answers correct - double points! Turning in all assignments on time and scoring 2 or 3 perfect worksheets during the semester usually means an "A" for Hazard City.
If you lose your CD or have other difficulties, contact me immediately (utnet email, NOT WebCT email) and we can look for a solution. This has happened before and there are several ways to get Hazard City to you with little effort, but you need to let me know that a problem exists!
Each project report must be submitted in the form of the worksheet included in the project. This is an example of a worksheet. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.
There are several ways to submit Hazard City projects. Some students fill out the worksheet and scan or capture the image. An image can be pasted to a Word document and attached to WebCT email. Other students reproduce the table in Excel, listing only the correct responses, rather than circle the correct responses or filling in the blanks. Hazard City projects are graded with 1 point for each correct answer. You must submit an image of the worksheet with your answers unambiguously indicated or a replica of the worksheet with headings for each field (column) and labels for each record (row). You need not explain your reasoning - your job is to deliver to the mayor the answers, not explanations he will probably not understand.
The mayor of Hazard City. His twin brother and intellectual equal is mayor of Townsville.
Filling in all the cells in this example earns you nothing, even though some cells contain correct answers. Yes, a student did try that, stating that all sites listed in one project were 'at risk'. When having to select either-or or true-false, you must demonstrate some ability to recognize degrees of risk.
Attachments MUST be Microsoft Word documents, .pdf format, .jpg format or Rich Text. There are still documents I cannot open. If I cannot open it, I cannot grade it and give credit for your having done it.
I can open images and prefer .jpg format. I can open bitmaps but those files are enormous! Save space on your computers and save images for my class as .jpg, never as bitmaps (.bmp).
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