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Water Purification: Clean and Pure
Project Summary: Students work to develop a system of filtering water when faced with a natural disaster or a boil order in their own home. A video tutorial for this plan is available on YouTube.
Driving Question (Teacher Guided, Student Constructed): What is the best method to filter water using easily obtainable household materials?
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Does water purification take a very long time?
This is a Project-Based Learning plan that has been developed for an 8-10 day experience. After you read the plan you may find ways to lengthen or shorten.
Great question!! The beauty of well written PBL projects is the flexibility. You can make this a deeper or more shallow learning experience. I developed it for students to do two different iterations of the filter, but you can shorten it by just having them do one filter. It takes away some of the learning from the redesign process, but allows them to still have the experience making a filter and testing it out. I would however strongly encourage you to keep in the public presentation aspect of the project. Have outside “judges” like parents or experts from the community come in to evaluate the student’s projects.
A great engineering project!
I agree!