Block 8: Public-Piece Prep: Turning a Plan Into an Earth Week Activity

What today is about

Turn your plan into a public piece, without hiding the trade-off to do it.

Your plan has been a document for an audience of one teacher. Today it becomes something a stranger can learn from. You build two public-facing things. The first is a live activity for the school's environmental showcase that teaches other students the choice your neighborhood faces. The framing matters: not "here is my plan," but "here is the trade-off this place has to make, what would you choose?" The second is a shareable artifact, a map-based infographic, a carousel, or a short captioned video, that carries the same message to people who never visited your station.

Here is the design tension this block is built around, and you should name it out loud. Public outreach rewards a clean, confident message: one big idea, no caveats, easy to share. The rubric rewards the opposite: naming what you sacrificed. If you let the public format win, your artifact becomes a slogan ("greener, fairer, flood-proof") that quietly erases the trade-off you worked so hard to make honest in Block 5. So the discipline today is to build a public piece that is clear and still shows the cost. The strongest artifacts make the trade-off the message: "to make this neighborhood walkable, we gave up X, and here is why we think that is worth it."

Two practical things, because this goes public. Your shareable artifact will be posted through a student takeover of the school's Instagram account for this unit, so it reaches a real audience well beyond the showcase. Because it lands on a public account, anything that names or shows real people needs consent, with an opt-out, and there is always a non-public fallback (you can present and submit without anything being posted). Design the piece so it works either way, and keep the people in it comfortable.

Build the artifact so it stands on its own at the showcase and also reads well as a post on the school's Instagram.