It is pretty neat when you can get two for the price of one- as most teachers can attest to with regard to trying to get everything into their curriculum. Did you know that this year, the FIRST LEGO League's challenge is focused on water. And what could be better, as that water is also the theme of this year's ENSO Student Research Campaign!
The LEGO Challenge Project states: "People use water every day, but they don’t think much about how and why they use water. Whether it’s directly (drinking or washing) or indirectly (manufacturing the products they use or producing food or energy), humans have a lot of different water needs. Your Project challenge for the HYDRO DYNAMICS season is to improve the way people find, transport, use, or dispose of water".
One of our GLOBE teachers, Cindy Lippencott, uses this program with her third and fourth grade students. This year, as they engage with both programs, the students will be able to collect precipitation data to determine about how much freshwater enters their schoolyard each month and use their data to help them work on a solution to decrease the impervious surfaces so their freshwater is filtered and causes less erosion during intense rainstorms.
Let us know if you are thinking about trying to tie the "Water in Our Environment" Student Research Campaign with another part of your curriculum or another initiative this year! We'd love to learn about the various programs that our teachers are considering for this school year.
