Steps in water education

Aside from all of our robotics fieldwork in Malta this past week, we’ve also been working on individual projects at home. For our Global Engineering class, we (Vanessa and Amanda) are working on a lesson plan for 7th-8th grade Social Studies students. The lesson plan involves two 45 minute class periods devoted to learning about Malta’s past, present, and predicted future with regards to water and conservation techniques.
We are making great progress with the project! We have planned two major activities (one for each day) along with other class discussions that we will incorporate into the final lesson plan.

The first activity involves students developing a timeline of Malta’s major events that connect to water availability or lack thereof (model pictured above). The activity involves breaking the students into groups and assigning them a historical event or period to read about. They will then summarize the three main points and draw a picture to represent the period. Finally, they will hang the events in chronological order on a clothesline to create a clothesline timeline. As we started developing the activity further this week, we have run into some problems with connecting all of the major events in Maltese history with water. For example, the Neolithic Period (5000 BCE - 2500 BCE) is really important in Maltese history. These people were the first known inhabitants of the island, and many interesting underground temples with sophisticated engineering. After visiting the most famous of these temples, the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum in Malta a few days ago and being fascinated by the extensive architecture of these early engineers, we really want to incorporate this into the timeline activity. Here's a picture of the hypogeum we visited:

However, it's difficult to draw a clear connection to water. We are doing more reseach about a prehistoric cistern that was possibly use prehistorically in the hypogeum. Even if an event doesn't directly relate to water, there are various themes that we've identified to be indirectly related throughout history. Some themes that relate to water are cultural influences, agriculture and land fertility, population trends, trade, irrigation systems, and practices involving the importation, extraction, and purification of water. This activity aims to approach each of these themes and touch upon how it relates to and impacts the historical and current usage of water in Malta.

Our second activity relates directly to cisterns and water consumption, and allows for students to compare and contrast various water conservation techniques. We have been working with Andrew for this activity because he is developing a WebGL program based upon Vanessa’s 3D simulation. His activity allows for students to select the number of people in their family, if they have a dishwasher, and other similar selections related to water. While it is still in development, we are working with him to correlate our activities so that a possible online homework assignment can be supplemented to our lesson. With the in class activity, students will need to calculate their water usage with basic math through a series of questions. Based on the students water usage, they will take a certain number of water droplets from the pile in the cistern.

It will clearly be more complex than the picture above...but it gets the idea across, right? We want the students to be able to identify their water usage and be able to make decisions on water conservation techniques to preserve the water stored in their cistern (especially during dry months). More updates on this coming soon!

-Vanessa & Amanda