Solving Environmental Problems through Engineering

Teaching Strategies

Standards and Practices

The National Association of Gifted Children (NAGC) Programming Standards, which are used to guide Gifted education, call on teachers to “provide opportunities to promote lifelong personal and social responsibility through advocacy and real world problem-solving.”⁴¹  This unit is an opportunity to have GT students refine their interest in “the environment” and allow them to positively contribute to the community.  This unit heeds the NAGC’s call to create opportunities for students to be advocates and problem-solvers by asking students to speculate about and examine stormwater, learn about its impacts on the environment, and create and implement a solution that addresses a specific problem they observe.  Students will learn about nonpoint source pollution and why it is of environmental concern, as well as learn about current interventions to clean and mitigate stormwater runoff.  Then they will then design and create an intervention that addresses a stormwater runoff issue of their choosing. 

It is also important that GT students work at a level that is above their age peers, commensurate with their ability.  Therefore, this unit will work to meet Oklahoma’s high school Environmental Science Oklahoma Academic Standards, for which students will be working to reduce the impact of human activity on stormwater by modifying or creating a solution for it.

While the content is above grade-level, this unit is written to serve middle school students, and therefore needs to also meet these standards and objectives.  In order to meet the NAGC standards on learning, and ensure that students are active participants in their learning, this unit uses two dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) framework for middle school: Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), and Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs).  Of the SEPs, students ask questions about stormwater runoff and define problems associated with it.  After investigating and gathering information on existing stormwater runoff mitigation techniques, students will analyze and interpret their data, and engage in an argument of which method shows the most promise for implementation at their school, with appropriate modifications.  In order to directly address DCIs, students will explicitly define the engineering problem, test and modify possible solutions, and optimize the solution they ultimately decide to develop.  For this unit, we will not be specifically addressing Crosscutting Concepts, though it is possible that the products of this unit will be referenced in the students’ regular science classes and vice versa.

Engineering Design Process

The Engineering Design Process is similar to the Scientific Method but focuses on building a solution to a problem.  There are several versions, but they all tend to include a variation of Ask, Research, Ideate, Create, Test, and Improve.  We will use an Iterative Engineering Design methodology, which emphasizes the cyclical nature of engineering, and is pictured below (Figure 4).  Once one has improved upon a design, it’s time to ask questions about it and start the process again. 

Figure 4: An illustration of the particular iterative Engineering Design Process this unit will use.

Depth and Complexity Strategies

The Depth & Complexity framework was created to challenge advanced learners and teach them to “think like disciplinarians in a deeper manner about content.”  The framework features eleven components, including eight Dimensions of Depth and three Dimensions of Complexity.  The goal of increased Depth is to move students toward expertise while striking a balance with content coverage, and the idea behind Complexity is to challenge students to make connections across disciplines, over time, and between disciplines.⁴³ Using strategies from this framework will ensure that this unit is sufficiently challenging for my GT students.  (D: Language-terminology; Rules-within the discipline, measurement, data systems, etc.; C: Over Time)