Population Connection Experience Report

On April 5th, I participated in the Population Connection: Hands-on Activities for People and the Planet. The event was at SUNY Cortland and was 75 minutes long. The workshop was conducted by Pam Wassermen, Vice President, of Education Population Connection. Population Connection is education program, which has developed age- appropriate curriculum and professional development workshops. Their emphasis is on hands- on learning and critical thinking.
The Workshop was made up of 8 different units: counting populations, how populations grow, how many is enough, meeting people’s basic needs, crowding, people and resource use, people and waste, people and wildlife. In the workshop we did 4 of the 8 activities. For each unit we did a different activity, our first activity was one person go to go stand in a hula hoop, and pretend to be a growing flower. The speaker then invited another person and another until about 6 people were in the hula hoop. The speaker then asked the original volunteer how they felt, now that most of their resources needed to live were blocked by other plants.
The next activity was Panther Hunt, which would go with meeting people’s basic needs. The point of the game was to pretend to be panthers and to take one cup at a time for
This activity was from the Meeting people’s basic needs unit. Each person then got a paper with different pictures on it and we had to decide with another person if the item was a want or a need. Some of the pictures were harder based on your interpretation for example, a bar of soap some people said it was a want and some thought it was a need. There was also differing opinions on some of the foods like hamburgers and fruit and vegetables. Overall, it was interesting to see the different interpretations between a want and a