Global Engineering Project Update

We have been working to improve our teaching module about Water and Society in Malta. We have made several updates to our module, including adjusting our first activity on the timeline of Malta's history in relation to water scarcity and water conservation techniques. With the advice of Jane and Zoe, we have decided to include quotes and a possible online web research activity to be conducted by the students in our activity.

This past week, we finalized the layout for the handouts for the timeline activity. Each group of students will be assigned a time period to focus on from Malta’s history. Then, the teacher will pass out a handout on each time period to familiarize the students so they can become experts on the period and share it with the class. We made the handout for the first period, which has instructions, the name/date of the period, and theme(s) for the students to focus on from that period. The themes relate to water in some way, whether it’s natural resource availability, trade, or population growth, etc. Then, there’s a few excerpts from different secondary sources along with pictures to help the students understand what they’re reading. We also define some difficult words/concepts in our own words on the right hand side of the page. We are done with the first time period and are about half way done with each of the other time periods.

Screen shot of timeline activity

We have been very busy with other projects and collecting data in Malta, but we are going to make significant progress on our teaching module this weekend! Our current plan is to complete the timeline activity by Friday so we can move on to the background for the activity and the lesson plan. Upon completion of the first lesson plan, we can start working on the second activity on water conservation techniques and history of water conservation in Malta. Andrew, as part of his 570 graphics project, is developing an interactive online activity with WebGL. We are working with him because he has done prior research and calculations on the amount of water used by an average Maltese household. In our second lesson plan, we have developed an in class activity that Andrew’s activity is based on. In collaboration with Andrew, we are working to create an activity with simple calculations that the students can do on their own. With the addition of historical and current water conservation techniques, the students will then be able to analyze their current water usage and develop strategies to limit or conserve water. The plan is to complete our teaching module by the beginning of next week so we can post it to the website! After that we can focus our attention on updating the website and continuing posting new research findings, further material, and new develops within the ICEX team.

-Amanda & Vanessa