AquaRoom
AquaRoom challenges students to employ analogs of the tools and methods used in hydrological practice to determine the presence, orientation, and flow rates of underground aquifers. Adopting the conceit that a network of aquifers runs beneath their classroom “town,” students:
- Use portable reading units (tablet computers, suction cup attached with a wire)
- Drill around the room * Deposit dye into the aquifers
- Collect samples
- Read the data in simulated spectrometer
- Track path, speed, and direction of aquifers
In AquaRoom, learners are invited to imagine that their classroom is a small town within which a new industrial plant is to be built and that they have been asked to recommend a construction site to the town’s mayor. While the plant is portrayed as providing much-needed jobs for the community, there is concern that the caustic chemicals used by the plant could pollute the drinking water, which comes from a series of aquifers running beneath the town. Choosing a construction site farther from the aquifers—or if closer, then at the least downstream so that pollutants would flow away from the town—would help to mitigate that concern. However, no one has ever done a hydrological study to map the topography or directional flow in the town’s aquifers.
Students are asked to construct that map, enacting a simplified version of a method that hydrologists employ in their practice: drilling into the ground to inject dye tracers and retrieve water samples to determine the topography and flow direction of aquifers.