In My Classroom #8 – Get At the Engineering

Welcome to the KABT blog segment, “In My Classroom”. This is a segment that will post about every two weeks from a different member. In 250 words or less, share one thing that you are currently doing in your classroom. That’s it.

The idea is that we all do cool stuff in our rooms and to some people there have been cool things so long that it feels like they are old news. However, there are new teachers that may be hearing things for the first time and veterans that benefit from reminders. So let’s share things, new and old alike. When you’re tagged you have two weeks to post the next entry. Your established staple of a lab or idea might be just what someone needs. So be brief, be timely and share it out! Here we go:

My student teacher and I made a decision to try to do a better job of addressing the engineering aspects of the NGSS expectations this year. I wanted to take a new look at the end of my Scientific Method unit to insert some engineering considerations. Vivian Choong had the idea to discuss water quality and use the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio as a context for a PBL.

It’s in the standards, seriously.

We decided to retool my blackworm lab to use them as bioindicators of water quality and take measurements of the worms’ homeostasis before and after different remediation attempts on some “polluted” water. Students designed ecological water filters (soil, sawdust… that kind of thing, not chemical filtration) and considered the economic costs and ecological benefits of their interventions.

We thought the students would measure blackworm pulse rate or other behavior indicators, but they gravitated much more to measurements of water turbidity and coloration. It’s super cool and they’re really engaged with the topical nature of the problem. This is a keeper that I hope to formalize after some debrief and further revision.

Here is our anchor video for the activity. Don’t ask me for submission tiers, because we’re not there yet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_w16PjoNVE

That’s it for me. Tag Andrew Davis, you’re it.