The schedule below is a working draft; sessions may be added/removed or reassigned to different days and/or time slots. We will provide notification once the final schedule is published.
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.
Conservation Program Coordinator, City of Austin Watershed Protection Department
Jessica Gordon is an educator for the City of Austin Watershed Protection Department. Her work involves teaching about aquifers, watersheds, and how our actions affect water quality. Her program for middle school students, Watershed Detectives, recently received a Groundwater Stewardship... Read More →
Thursday August 3, 2017 10:15am - 11:15am CDT
JBWS 163