Why Did the Sheep Cross the Road?
Students can use ArcExplorer to look at real-world data and discover why desert bighorn sheep want to get to the other side of a stretch of Highway 93 between Kingman, Arizona, and Hoover Dam. “Why Did the Sheep Cross the Road,” a set of instructional materials created by CIPE, was produced through a grant from the Arizona Advisory Council on Environmental Education. These materials supplement course work on the environment, desert ecology, or wildlife and is geared for students in the sixth through the tenth grades. These lessons involve a real problem-public concern over the number of desert bighorn sheep killed by automobiles along a stretch of Highway 93 and data from the Arizona Game, and Fish Department, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other state and federal agencies. Students, divided into groups of four, play the roles of engineers and biologists and analyze factors such as the location of the sheep’s food and water sources, the home ranges of individual sheep, the route the h
