This second water engineering camp provided students and their teachers with knowledge and skills to subsequently investigate and present findings on water related questions in their local areas.  What strategies do you use for motivating students to investigate questions of ecology?

Thank you for sharing your work. It's interesting to hear students' perspectives on how the summer camp learning environment helped them learn about water engineering, and on their interests in STEM fields. I noticed the project abstract mentions that one intended outcome of this work is to increase students' understanding of relationships between water engineering and environment, and you have also commented on how the second camp provided students and teachers with certain skills. Can you say more about how your project has measured/is measuring these outcomes?

Thanks for putting together the video clip of your program for the Showcase. Well produced and engaging! While there was a good amount of content on water testing, it was not clear from the presentation what aspects of water engineering (such as treatment and mitigation, hydraulics and hydrodynamics, engineering and design, etc.) were part of the program.

As far as your question, We try to bring systems thinking to young people through gesture-based and immersive, socio-environmental experiences. For example: https://nysci.org/home/exhibits/connected-worlds/

Hi Jim and others,

Your program sounds similar to our SMART program at UMaine. We have integrated engineering by having the students and teachers design and build water quality sensors. We also provide 3D printers and students have been quite innovative in designing and printing devices to aid in their water research projects. We still would like to provide more engineering design opportunities that link water quality and water management. I like the filtration activity that you do, and it sounds like it is available through EWB resources.

We motivate our students to investigate water ecology/quality by first showing them how to measure water quality parameters, and asking them to develop water research projects that are relevant to their community.  

Thanks Tiffany - we will definitely check out your SMART program!

Thank you for sharing your project.  It's nice hearing the student voices in the video and seeing the students engaged in the activities.  I'm curious if you have plans to scale the project up to include more students and/or additional types of engineering.

What a great program.  Can you say more about how you advertise for and recruit your students and teachers?  What incentive do the teachers have to participate in your program?  Is there a cost for the students to participate?

Hi Bess, thanks for your interest and questions.  We have 11 schools participating in our GEAR UP program with a site coordinator at each school.  These site coordinators use flyers and recommendations from science teachers to select student participants.  We recruit science and/or mathematics teachers to participate in the professional development.  In addition to having daily PD during the camp, the teachers attend a mid-year, day-long seminar.  The teachers receive a $1000 stipend and an equipment kit to do similar investigations during the school year.  The project covers all expenses for the students.