Kansas City metropolitan area

The Kansas City metropolitan area is a 14-county metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri that straddles the border between the U.S. states of Missouri and Kansas. With a population of 2,393,623, it ranks as the second largest metropolitan area with its core in Missouri (after Greater St. Louis) and has a population in Kansas larger than the Wichita metropolitan area. Alongside Kansas City, the area includes a number of other cities and suburbs, the largest being Overland Park, Kansas; Kansas City, Kansas; and Independence, Missouri; all over 100,000 in population.The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) serves as the Council of Governments and the Metropolitan Planning Organization for the area.

Geographic overview

The larger Kansas City Metropolitan Area as seen on a map can be visualized roughly as four quadrants:

The northeast quadrant of the map is locally referred to as "north of the river" or "the Northland". It includes parts of Clay County, Missouri including North Kansas City, Missouri. North Kansas City is bounded by a bend in the Missouri River that defines a border between Wyandotte County, Kansas and Clay County, Missouri running approximately North-South and a border between North Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri running approximately East-West. The sharpest part of the river bend forms a peninsula containing the Kansas City Downtown Airport.

Kansas

Kansas ⁱ/ˈkænzəs/ is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind", although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans". For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue.

When it was officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine whether Kansas would become a free state or a slave state. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed, and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas grew rapidly when waves of immigrants turned the prairie into farmland. Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, corn, sorghum, and soybeans. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 34th most populous of the 50 United States.

City

A city is a large and permanent human settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town in general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.

Cities generally have complex systems for sanitation, utilities, land usage, housing, and transportation. The concentration of development greatly facilitates interaction between people and businesses, benefiting both parties in the process, but it also presents challenges to managing urban growth.

A big city or metropolis usually has associated suburbs and exurbs. Such cities are usually associated with metropolitan areas and urban areas, creating numerous business commuters traveling to urban centers for employment. Once a city expands far enough to reach another city, this region can be deemed a conurbation or megalopolis. In terms of population, the largest city proper is Shanghai, while the fastest-growing is Dubai.

Origins

There is not enough evidence to assert what conditions gave rise to the first cities. Some theorists have speculated on what they consider suitable pre-conditions and basic mechanisms that might have been important driving forces.

Educational film

An educational film is a film or movie whose primary purpose is to educate. Educational films have been used in classrooms as an alternative to other teaching methods.

Cultural significance

Many educational films shown in schools are part of long series - for example, films demonstrating scientific principles and experiments tend to be episodic, with each episode devoted to a specific experiment or principle.

Many schoolchildren in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s watched hundreds of episodes of British-made educational films (all very similar in style and production) over the course of their primary school careers. As a result, the delivery-style and distinctive colour-palette ("scientific" looking neutral-blue backgrounds etc.) of these films is instantly recognisable to any child of the appropriate generation. This was used to great effect by the British television series Look Around You which parodies these films.

Research into the Educational Benefits of Learning from Film and Video