Save a Life, Clean Some Water!
Figure 1. A high school student team builds a septic tank system with a slow sand filter.
Student teams practice water quality analysis through turbidity measurement and coliform bacteria counts. They use information about water treatment processes to design prototype small-scale water treatment systems and test the influent (incoming) and effluent (outgoing) water to assess how well their prototypes produce safe water to prevent water-borne illnesses.
A leading cause of childhood mortality in developing countries is water-borne illness. Health practitioners can usually treat these illnesses if they are caught in time, but engineers can prevent them from happening in the first place by designing and implementing effective water treatment systems to provide potable (i.e., suitable for drinking ) water to people around the world.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe measurement of water quality through turbidity and coliform bacterial counts.
- Design and build prototypes of small-scale systems to clean water.
- Evaluate water treatment methods and make recommendations for improvements to achieve better water quality.