Water

Students leach organic matter from soil to create a water sample with high dissolved organic matter content (DOM), and then make filters to see if the DOM can be removed. They experience the difficulties of removing DOM from water, and learn about other processes that might make DOM removal more eff...

Students learn how water is used to generate electricity. They investigate water's potential-to-kinetic energy transformation in hands-on activities about falling water and waterwheels. During the activities, they take measurements, calculate averages and graph results.

Students learn about the differences between water source types (surface and ground) as well as the differences between streams, rivers and lakes. Then, they learn about dissolved organic matter (DOM) and the role it plays in identifying drinking water sources.

Students learn about and experiment with the concept of surface tension. They examine how a paper clip can "float" on top of water, as well as how a paper boat can be powered by soap in water. Additionally, they explore how water striders "walk" on top of water.

Students construct three-dimensional models of water catchment basins using everyday objects to form hills, mountains, valleys and water sources. They experiment to see where rain travels and collects, and survey water pathways to see how they can be altered by natural and human activities.

Students model a water catchment basin and survey water pathways to understand factors that affect water flow.

Whether on Earth or in space, life-threatening illnesses may occur if the water we drink is of poor quality. It’s up to your students to design and build a filtration system for the International Space Station so they can guarantee astronauts get the safe and clean water they need.

While the creation of a dam provides many benefits, it can have negative impacts on local ecosystems. Students learn about the major environmental impacts of dams and the engineering solutions used to address them.

Students design ways to either clean a water source or find a new water source, depending on given hypothetical family scenarios. They act as engineers to draw and write about what they could do to provide water to a community facing a water crisis. They also learn the basic steps of the engineering...

Students learn about water bodies on our plant, including their uses and qualities. They learn several ways that engineers help people to maintain and conserve water sources.

Students measure the permeability of different types of soils, compare results and realize the importance of size, voids and density in permeability response.

Students learn about the human water cycle, or how humans impact the water cycle by settling down in civilizations. Specifically, they learn how people obtain, use and dispose of water.

Students engineer a method for cleaning water, discover the most effective way to filter water and practice conducting a scientific experiment. Through this activity and its associated lesson, student teams follow the steps of the engineering design process related to water treatment, as done by pra...

Looking at models and maps, students explore different pathways and consequences of pollutant transport via the weather and water cycles. In an associated literacy activity, students develop skills of observation, recording and reporting as they follow the weather forecast and produce their own weat...

Students learn about ocean currents and the difference between salt and fresh water by using colored ice cubes to see how cold and warm water mix and how this mixing causes currents. They also learn how fresh water floats on top of salt water, the difference between ocean and fresh, and how engineer...

Students are introduced to the concepts of graywater and water reuse within households. They calculate the amount of used water a family generates in one day and use a model of home plumbing to find out how much graywater is produced in homes every day.

Students explore snowmelt as a source of fresh water that used in many communities. Students determine whether they think one cup of snow produces an equal amount of water. They use a model to explain how packed snow does not yield the same amount in fresh water.

Through the use of models and scientific investigation, students explore the causes of water pollution and its effects on the environment. Through the two associated activities, they investigate filtration and aeration processes that are used for removing pollutants from water.

In this hands-on activity, students investigate different methods—aeration and filtering—for removing pollutants from water. Working in teams, they design, build and test their own water filters—essentially conducting their own "dirty water projects." A guiding data collection worksheet is provided....

Students learn about the importance of dams by watching a video that presents historical and current information on dams, as well as descriptions of global water resources and the hydrologic cycle. Students also learn about different types of dams, all designed to resist the forces on dams.

In a class demo, students watch a simple water cycle model to understand its role in pollutant transport. The activity simulates a point source of pollution in a lake and the resulting environmental consequences.

Students are asked to design methods to filter water using ordinary materials, while also considering their designs' material and cost efficiencies. They learn about the importance of water and its role in our everyday lives.

Students observe a model waterwheel to investigate the transformations of energy involved in turning the blades of a hydro-turbine. They work as engineers to create model waterwheels while considering resources such as time and materials, in their designs. Students also discuss and explore the chara...

Students learn about floods, discovering that different types of floods occur from different water sources, but primarily from heavy rainfall. Students learn what makes floods dangerous and what engineers design to predict, control and survive floods.

In this activity, students use models to investigate the process and consequences of water contamination on the land, groundwater, and plants. This is a good introduction to building water filters found in the associated activity, The Dirty Water Project.

Students learn about the Earth's water cycle, especially about evaporation.

Students learn how water flows through the ground, what an aquifer is, and what solid properties predict groundwater flow. Groundwater is one of the largest sources of drinking water, so environmental engineers need to understand groundwater flow in order to tap into this important resource.

Students learn the fundamentals of using microbes to treat wastewater. They discover how wastewater is generated and its primary constituents. Microbial metabolism, enzymes and bioreactors are explored to fully understand the primary processes occurring within organisms.

Students learn how to engineer a design for a polymer brush—a coating consisting of polymers that represents an antifouling polymer brush coating for a water filtration surface.

Students gain a basic understanding of the properties of media—soil, sand, compost, gravel—and how these materials affect the movement of water (infiltration/percolation) into and below the surface of the ground. They test each type of material, determining storage capacity, field capacity and infil...

Students explore the impact of changing river volumes and different floodplain terrain in experimental trials with table top-sized riverbed models. The models are made using modeling clay in aluminum baking pans placed on a slight incline.

In this activity, students use a tutorial on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn about how surface water is treated to make it safe to drink.

Students learn about water poverty and how water engineers can develop appropriate solutions to a problem that is plaguing nearly a sixth of the world's population. Students follow the engineering design process to design a gravity-fed water system.

Student teams locate a contaminant spill in a hypothetical site by measuring the pH of soil samples. Then they predict the direction of groundwater flow using mathematical modeling. They also follow the steps of the engineering design process to come up with alternative treatments for the contaminat...

This lesson plan helps students understand the factors that affect water quality and the conditions that allow for different animals and plants to survive. Students look at the effects of water quality on various water-related activities and describe water as an environmental, economic and social re...

Students learn about porosity and permeability and relate these concepts to groundwater flow. They use simple materials to conduct a porosity experiment and use the data to understand how environmental engineers decide on the placement and treatment of a drinking water well.

Students keep track of their own water usage for one week, gaining an understanding of how much water is used for various everyday activities. They relate their own water usages to the average residents of imaginary Thirsty County, and calculate the necessary water capacity of a dam that would provi...

Students are presented with examples of the types of problems that environmental engineers solve, specifically focusing on water quality issues. Topics include the importance of clean water, the scarcity of fresh water, tap water contamination sources, and ways environmental engineers treat contamin...

Students are introduced to the structure, function and purpose of locks and dams, which involves an introduction to Pascal's law, water pressure and gravity.

Students apply their understanding of the natural water cycle and the urban "stormwater" water cycle, as well as the processes involved in both cycles to hypothesize how the flow of water is affected by altering precipitation. Once hypotheses and specific experimental steps are developed, students u...

Students examine in detail the water cycle components and phase transitions, and then learn how water moves through the human-made urban environment. Students show their understanding of the process by writing a description of the path of a water droplet through the urban water cycle, from the dropl...

Students learn about the techniques engineers have developed for changing ocean water into drinking water, including thermal and membrane desalination. They learn how processes can be viewed as systems, with unique objects, inputs, components and outputs, and sketch their own system diagrams to desc...

In this activity, students learn how water can be polluted by algal blooms. They grow algae with different concentrations of fertilizer or nutrients and analyze their results as environmental engineers working to protect a local water resource.

Students explore different levels of permeability and compare the permeabilities of several different materials. They also are introduced to the basic concepts of building design, landscape architecture and environmental pollutant transport.

For students who have already been introduced to the water cycle, this lesson is intended as a logical follow-up. Students learn about human impacts on the water cycle that create a pathway for pollutants beginning with urban development and joining the natural water cycle as surface runoff.

Students experience the steps of the engineering design process as they design solutions for a real-world problem that could affect their health. After a quick review of the treatment processes that municipal water goes through before it comes from the tap, they learn about the still-present measura...

Student are introduced to rivers, and to the components of the water cycle. They think about the effects of communities, sidewalks and roads on the natural flow of rainwater. Students also learn about the role of engineering in community planning and protecting our natural resources.

Students groups build water filters using activated carbon, cotton and other materials to clean a "dirty" water sample made from chocolate powder added to tap water. They test and make observations of filter effectiveness, suggesting material and layering design improvements.

Students learn how environmental engineers monitor water quality in resource use and design. They employ environmental indicators to assess the water quality of a nearby stream. Students make general observations of water quality as well as count the number of macroinvertabrates and use the informat...

Students see how different levels of surface tension affect water's ability to move. Teams "race" water droplets down tracks made of different materials, making measurements, collecting data, making calculations, graphing results and comparing to their predictions and the properties of each surface,...

Students learn about Pascal's law, an important concept behind the engineering of dam and lock systems, such as the one that Thirsty County wants Splash Engineering to design for the Birdseye River (an ongoing hypothetical engineering scenario). Students observe the behavior of water in plastic wate...

Students use a thermal process approach to design, build and test a small-scale desalination plant that is capable of significantly removing the salt content from a saltwater solution. Students use a saltwater circuit to test the efficiency of their model desalination plant and learn how the water c...

Students measure the effectiveness of water filters in purifying contaminated water. They prepare test water by creating different concentrations of bleach (chlorine-contaminated) water. After passing the contaminated water through commercially available Brita® water filters designed to purify drink...

Students use modeling clay, a material that is denser than water and thus ordinarily sinks in water, to discover the principle of buoyancy. They begin by designing and building boats out of clay that will float in water, and then refine their designs so that their boats will carry as great a load (m...

Students learn about physical models of groundwater and how environmental engineers determine possible sites for drinking water wells. Students create their own groundwater well models using coffee cans and wire screening. They add red food coloring to their models to see how pollutants can migrate ...

Students learn the vocabulary associated with groundwater and see a demonstration of groundwater flow. Students learn about the measurements that environmental engineers need when creating a groundwater model of a chemical plume.

Students learn about several possible scenarios of contamination to drinking water, which comes from many different sources, including surface water and groundwater. They analyze the movement of sample contaminants through groundwater, in a similar way to how environmental engineers analyze the phys...

Students learn about the various methods developed by environmental engineers for treating drinking water in the United States.

Students are presented with a short lesson on the difference between cohesive forces (the forces that hold water molecules together and create surface tension) and adhesive forces (the forces that causes water to "stick" to solid surfaces. Students are also introduced to examples of capillary action...

Student teams design, construct, test and improve small working models of water treatment plant processes to filter out contaminants and reclaim resources from simulated wastewater. They keep to a materials budget and earn money from reclaimed materials. They conduct before/after water quality tests...

Students observe multiple examples of capillary action. First they observe the shape of a glass-water meniscus and explain its shape in terms of the adhesive attraction of the water to the glass. Then they study capillary tubes and observe water climbing due to capillary action in the glass tubes.

Students test and observe the "self-cleaning" lotus effect using a lotus leaf and cloth treated with a synthetic lotus-like superhydrophobic coating. They also observe the Wenzel and Cassie Baxter wetting states by creating and manipulating condensation droplets on the leaf surface.

Students experience firsthand one of the most common water treatment types in the industry today, flocculants. They learn how the amount of suspended solids in water is measured using the basic properties of matter and light. In addition, they learn about the types of solids that can be found in wat...

Students learn how to use and graph real-world stream gage data to create event and annual hydrographs and calculate flood frequency statistics. Using an Excel spreadsheet of real-world event, annual and peak streamflow data, they manipulate the data (converting units, sorting, ranking, plotting), s...

Students observe how water acts differently when placed on hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. They determine which coatings are best to cause surfaces to shed water quickly or reduce the "fogging" caused by condensation.

Students create a water bottle from common materials used in purification tools that can clean dirty water as an inexpensive alternative to a modern filter. Students may iterate upon their design based off their experiment and the designs of their classmates after initial testing.

Students observe capillary action in glass tubes of varying sizes. Then they use the capillary action to calculate the surface tension in each tube. They find the average surface tensions and calculate the statistical errors.

Students learn how engineers design devices that use water to generate electricity by building model water turbines and measuring the resulting current produced in a motor. Student teams work through the engineering design process to build the turbines, analyze the performance of their turbines and ...

Students are challenged with determining whether the water level in a pond rises, drops or remains the same after a large rock is thrown overboard from a floating boat in a pond.

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 the...

Students perform one of the first steps that environmental engineers do to determine water quality—sampling and analysis. Student teams measure the electrical conductivity of four water samples (deionized water, purified water, school tap water and a salt-water solution) using teacher-made LED-condu...

Students are introduced to superhydrophobic surfaces and the "lotus effect." Students learn how plants create and use superhydrophobic surfaces in nature and how engineers have created human-made products that mimic the properties of these natural surfaces.

Students are presented with the question: "Why does a liquid jet break up into droplets?" and introduced to its importance in inkjet printers. A discussion of cohesive forces and surface tension is included, as well as surface acting agents (surfactants) and their ability to weaken the surface tensi...

Students extend their understanding of surface tension by exploring the real-world engineering problem of deciding what makes a "good" soap bubble. Student teams first measure this property, and then use this measurement to determine the best soap solution for making bubbles. They experiment with ad...

Students learn about water quality testing and basic water treatment processes and technology options. Biological, physical and chemical treatment processes are addressed, as well as physical and biological water quality testing, including testing for bacteria such as E. coli.

In this activity, students learn about two commonly used flocculants and clean water collected from a local pond or river. They experiment with flocculant, stirring and pH variables.

In this activity, student teams design, prototype and test piping systems to transport water from a storage tank to an existing Tippy Tap hand-washing station, thereby creating a more efficient hand-washing station. Through this example service-learning engineering project, students learn basic flui...

Students collect a large set of data learn how to use spreadsheets to graph the data and find mean, median, mode, and range. They compare their findings to the national average of water use per person per day and used to evaluate how much water would need to be provided in a town recovering from a d...

Students learn about the water cycle and its key components. They learn how we can use the theory of conservation of mass to estimate the amount of water that enters a watershed (precipitation, groundwater flowing in) and exits a watershed (evaporation, runoff, groundwater out).

Students are presented with the concepts of wetting and contact angle. They are also introduced to the distinction between hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. Students observe how different surfaces are used to maintain visibility under different conditions.

This activity focuses on getting students to think about bacteria, water quality and water treatment processes. Students develop and test their hypotheses about the "cleanliness" of three water samples prepared by the teacher. Then they grow bacteria in Petri dishes from the water samples.