We are teaching week 2 of the camp and our section of the unit is centered around this question: How does water consumption, waste, dining habits/procedures, and energy consumption effect the George Mason University campus community? From there, we took each of the 4 components and broke them into topics to cover for Monday-Thursday with a culminating activity on Friday. Our group chose to focus on water consumption.
In order to tie in the material from the previous week (ecosystems), we decided to take students to the pond to collect water samples. While at the pond, they will be asked to make observations and then ponder whether they think the pond is healthy or not and to justify their answer. They will collect their samples and we will journey back to the lab. Along the way we will discuss the watershed and how water travels on campus. The students will use the pond water to analyze and collect data about its pH, turbidity, coliform content, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, and temperature. (In case you were wondering, we have all of the materials to evaluate each of those things! WHOA! It's like Christmas for a teacher!) Students will then be able to reflect back on their initial observations and decide whether the pond truly is healthy by asking nature of science type questions: What does healthy mean, in terms of the pond? How does our data support your response? Does our data help you define "healthy"? What, if anything, do you think needs to change about the health of the pond? How could we do that?
After lunch, we begin talking about water consumption. We will ask students about how much water they think they use in a day and why that's even important to ask when we're talking about ecosystems. To emphasize this concept, we're taking students on a "field trip" to a dorm. They will go into the bathroom... an adventure in it's own rite... and, with a stopwatch and a bucket, they will collect the water from the shower that flows out in 1 minute. Students will then measure the capacity of their collection. When we return to the classroom, we will find the average time the students spend in the shower and using our previous "shower data" figure out how much water is used in a shower. To make it even bigger, students will use the number of college students at mason to figure out how many gallons of water are used for showers alone on campus.
After we have collected this data, we will be sure to pose the questions: do your results surprise you? Is there anything else we should have taken into consideration when calculating water consumption? We will talk about the results in the context of the STARS rating: Do you think the amount of water used is excessive? If so, do you have any suggestions for cutting down water consumption on campus? What are they and how would you implement them?
To close out the day, we will take 30 minutes for them to compile their information that they will use for their culminating activity. Our "undercover agents" will be producing a multimedia presentation to present their findings and recommendations to the "STARS Board" (the movers, shakers, and rating makers made up of GMU professors and others TBA!) at a "community forum" (community members being parents!). Students will be "strutting their scientific stuff" they have done over the course of 2 weeks by showing what they did, how they did it, what they found, and what they suggest!
Seriously... how totally awesome is this?!
Tomorrow- peer reviewing each others' lessons!
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