This lesson will introduce students to environmental issues. Students will recognize environmental opinions and perspective, which will help them define themselves and others as either preservationists or conservationists. Students also learn about the importance of teamwork in engineering.

Students identify types and sources of indoor air pollutants in their school and home environments. They evaluate actions that can be taken to reduce and prevent poor indoor air quality. In an associated literacy activity, students develop a persuasive peer-to-peer case against smoking with the goal to understand how language usage can influence perception, attitudes and behavior.

In this lesson, students develop an understanding of the critical role communication plays in an engineer's life. Students create products to communicate their learning about the engineering role in the environment.

In this lesson, students will learn about how volcanoes are created. Includes video links, discussion, and activity instructions.

NGSS: 2-ESS1-1

Time: 50 minutes

Materials: bucket of clay and toothpicks

Students observe and discuss a vacuum cleaner model of a baghouse to better understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

Students observe demonstrations, and build and evaluate simple models to understand the greenhouse effect, the role of increased greenhouse gas concentration in global warming, and the implications of global warming theory for engineers, themselves and the Earth. In an associated literacy activity, students learn how a bill becomes law and research global warming legislation.

This unit covers the processes of photosynthesis, extinction, biomimicry and bioremediation. In the first lesson on photosynthesis, students learn how engineers use the natural process of photosynthesis as an exemplary model of a complex yet efficient process for converting solar energy to chemical energy or distributing water throughout a system. In the next lesson on species extinction, students learn that it is happening at an alarming rate. Students discover that the destruction of habitat is the main reason many species are threatened and how engineers are trying to stop this habitat destruction. The third lesson introduces students to the idea of biomimicry or looking to nature for engineering ideas. And, in the fourth and final lesson, students learn about a specialty branch of engineering called bioremediation the use of living organisms to aid in the clean up of pollutant spills.

This video segment from a WPSU documentary Liquid Assets connects public health to the availability of clean and safe drinking water and elaborates on the threats our bodies face due to increasing kinds and quantities of pollutants.

In this video segment adapted from the Alaska Native Heritage Center, discover the connections between Alaska Native subsistence culture and the natural cycle of the seasons.

Students learn how paper is made. Working together, student teams make their own paper. This activity introduces students to recycling; what it is, its value and benefits, and how it affects their lives.

Students redesign and justify the packaging used in consumer products. Design criteria include reducing the amount of packaging material by 25%.

The Malaysia Sustainable Cities Practicum is an intensive field-based course that brings 15 graduate students to Malaysia to learn about and analyze sustainable city development in five cities in Malaysia. The students in the Practicum will help determine the extent to which these efforts have been successful. They will identify specific projects or policy-making efforts that the following year’s cohort of International Visiting Scholars can examine more closely. 
Lead Faculty
Professor Larry Susskind
Teaching Assistants
Jessica Gordon
Yasmin Zaerpoor
Administrative Staff
Takeo Kuwabara
Selmah Goldberg

Market to Market is a part of the Iowa Public Television. The website includes videos of feature stories and market analysis by analyst Ted Seifried. In addition, there is Market to Market in the classroom where there are videos on business, technology and science of agriculture.

Geologist Peter Appel and a miner Leoncio Onay tells about mercury free gold mining by the ‘gravity-borax method’.

Students observe and discuss a cup and pencil model of a cyclone to better understand the science behind how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"A fish's health is a reflection of its environment Healthy waters produce healthy fish While understanding how environmental factors like pollution affect fish populations can be extremely difficult researchers are beginning to find answers by exploring the one feature that separates fish from their environment their skin The diverse microbial community that resides on fish's skin is like a living almanac recording entire histories of environmental changes, both good and bad Using genetic barcoding, researchers recently discovered how human disturbances are imprinted by the microbiota on fish skin For streams along the Jordan River, the team found that nutrient dumping was linked to the abundance of certain bacteria namely, Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes providing one way of finding sites affected by transient nutrient pollution This powerful new method could be critical in gauging the status of both fish and the water they inhabit as the microbial communities that thrive on fish skin capture environmental.."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

After watching a short online video that recaps the enormous scale of accumulating plastic waste in our oceans, student teams are challenged to devise a method to remove the most plastic microbeads from a provided commercial personal care product—such as a facial cleanser or body wash. They brainstorm filtering methods ideas and design their own specific procedures that use teacher-provided supplies (coffee filters, funnels, plastic syringes, vinyl tubing, water, plastic bags) to extract the microplastics as efficiently as possible. The research and development student teams compare the final masses of their extracted microbeads to see which filter solutions worked best. Students suggest possible future improvements to their filter designs. A student worksheet is provided.

As students learn about the creation of biodomes, they are introduced to the steps of the engineering design process, including guidelines for brainstorming. Students learn how engineers are involved in the design and construction of biodomes and use brainstorming to come up with ideas for possible biodome designs. This lesson is part of a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

(eTwinining Project) Magicland Planet's all works of Ministry of Environment are gathered in this infographic link:

Students make Moebius strips and use them to demonstrate the interconnectedness of an environment. They explore the natural cycles water, oxygen/carbon dioxide, carbon, nitrogen that exist within the environment.