Engineering for Cleaner Streams: An Environmental Education STEM Project (EE-STEM)

     Antonio has developed some resources for integrating children's lit in this project.  He has listed, and annotated, a number of books dealing with water, recycling, alternative energy, and weather.  The documents can be found under the More tab on the Menu line.

     RE Charge Labs sells solar water pumps and waterproof solar motors - materials that your students might find very helpful in designing their stream-cleaning machines.  The motors and pumps are reasonably priced and you do get a discount for ordering in volume. Waterproof Solar Motor Submersible Solar Water Pump    The RE Charge Labs site also has some good activities for solar and wind power, all downloadable PDFs.  Check here to see the resources.

     The TeacherGeek website provides some excellent ideas (complete with build guides and student challenge documents as free downloadable PDF's) for getting started with designing and building stream-cleaning machines.  The solar vehicles (powered by solar cells) and wind turbines pages provide the basic design for these machines so that students can focus on adding some type of cleaning device to the original design. Here are the links to those pages on the site: Solar Car  (energy from the sun powers the motors that move the car) Electrical Boat (use a solar panel for power instead of the batteries) Wind Turbine  (the wind turbine generates power to pump water)      Each of these pages provides links for downloadable build guides, student challenges, and other helpful documents.  There are also several picture examples of machines that have been build using the TeacherGeek materials and recyclables.  Notice in the wind turbine photos, the students are using multime

     I asked students in my Scientific Inquiry class, an Elementary grade Science Methods course, to construct stream-cleaning machines, using Teacher Geek building materials and recyclables.  They were able to visit the TeacherGeek.com site for building guides, construction ideas, and to see photos of similar builds.      While they could use the Teacher Geek documents for ideas, they still had to add a "cleaner" attachment to their machine.  The students were quite innovative in solving this problem, some added scoops, some added trailing net bags, and one developed a water filtration system using a wind-powered water pump.  The photos below show some of the machines. Wind-powered trash scoop boat with hydraulic lifts for the scoop.  This was developed by Emma Jones, Bailey Lustig, and Allie Smith. Julia Grass' and Emily Stoklosa's solar-powered fan boat with trailing net for collecting debris. Close up view of Julia and Emily's boat.