Students will launch the project by exploring California park clues, testing early ideas about regions, ecosystems, and visitor behavior, and naming questions they want to investigate as junior park rangers.

Students will gather evidence from maps, photos, captions, ranger notes, and a live ranger conversation to understand how a California national park works as an ecosystem and what visitors need to know to protect it. They will organize observations, test assumptions about visitor behavior, and create an empathy artifact that identifies user needs, conservation concerns, and a focused problem to guide later design work.

Students will turn their park research into a focused design brief, generate several visitor guide ideas, test those ideas with peers, and choose one evidence-based direction to carry into prototyping.

Students will turn their chosen visitor guide idea into a testable draft, gather feedback from classmates and a park ranger, revise with evidence, and prepare a refined prototype that shows how design choices help visitors protect park ecosystems while still enjoying them.

Students will present their completed California National Park Visitor Guides to classmates, families, and a park ranger, explain how research and feedback shaped their conservation choices, and use audience feedback to make a final revision and reflect on what makes a place worth protecting.