Oil: Clean It Up!
Student teams move through the engineering design process. They create, test and improve oil spill cleanup kits, designing them to be inexpensive and accessible for homeowners to use or for big companies to give to individual workers to aid in personal home, community or corporate environmental oil cleanup. After deciding on a target user and scenario, teams conduct research and draw from an assortment of ordinary materials and supplies made available by the teacher. As a concluding gallery walk, each group presents its final prototype and summary poster to the rest of the class.
What would help you clean up an oil spill?Copyright 2011 New Zealand Defense Force, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rena_oil_spill_cleanup.jpg
- an assortment of project materials, such as napkins, paper towels, rags, wax, flour, popsicle sticks, dried flowers, cotton, construction paper, sponges, oatmeal and kitty litter; consider providing all sorts of other materials and/or have students brainstorm about materials they think might be useful for their products/kits
- materials for bonding items together, such as wire, string, glue, tape, super glue, hot glue
- an assortment of oil types, for testing, such as cooking oil, motor oil, gasoline, etc.; depending on your students and how you want the challenge to go, consider limiting the types of oil students may choose from to those you are able to make available for design testing
- materials with which to test products/kits for their cleaning effectiveness in simulated oil spills, such as linoleum squares, concrete blocks, tubs of soil/sand, tubs of water, squares of sod and/or other surfaces/materials that students target to clean
- additional materials, if available, such as 3D pens to create rough designs of prototype products
- computers with Internet access, for student research
- poster board or butcher paper, for teams to create final summary posters
Contributors
Norma Carmona
Supporting Program
Nanotechnology RET, Department of Earth Science, School Science and Technology, Rice University
Acknowledgements
This material was developed in collaboration with the Rice University Office of STEM Engagement, based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. EEC 1406885—the Nanotechnology Research Experience for Teachers at the Rice University School Science and Technology in Houston, TX. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or Rice University.
Copyright
2017 by Regents of the University of Colorado; original © 2017 Rice University