8th Grade STEAM Project
After researching the global water crisis, eighth grade students designed and built three devices for water collection and purification. One group built a solar desalination device which uses the power of the sun to evaporate fresh water from salt water. Another group built a fog harvester by combining two existing designs, the fog catcher and the fog harp. The remaining groups built gravity fed water filtration devices.
To kick off the project, our students visited the Bartlett-Crowe Field Station, an outdoor laboratory of Emory & Henry college. While there, they learned more about our local watershed and collected water data from three water sources on the site using digital tools and a kick net to collect aquatic macroinvertebrates.
Our students also acted as citizen scientists as they partnered with EarthEcho International to test and report the quality of our own campus stream. EarthEcho sent us a monitoring kit capable of assessing pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. Our students joined people from over 140 countries who contribute data to EarthEcho’s water monitoring website and have become part of the solution for clean water and healthy waterways worldwide.
