AISD Science + Mathematics X Conference

Engage students in understanding important local issues related to water quality, flood safety, and endangered species habitat through hands-on experiments, PBL, technology integration and field investigations. Watershed Detectives offers the Fish Kill Mystery, flooding experiments and field trip opportunities. In the Fish Kill Mystery, based on a pollution event that happened in Austin, students experiment with watershed models and water quality tests to locate the source of contamination. To learn about flooding, students build models of low water crossings to observe water washing a car off the road and use a free GIS web map to determine if they live in a floodplain and create a map showing low water crossings on their way to school. Field trip opportunities include water quality testing of local streams, caving into the Edwards Aquifer and learning about endangered salamander habitat at Barton Springs. Lessons are correlated to the TEKS and come with free educational resources.