IGW in Classroom - A Tool for Active and Engaged Learning

The fact that the software provides real-time response in an easy to understand form makes it an ideal tool for educational use, training and public outreach activities. The software changes the role of the student in complex problem solving projects from heavily physical to cognitive problem solving and decision making tasks. The seamless model integration, visual interactivity, and real-time processing and communication capability make it possible for students to focus on critical conceptual issues and to quickly and iteratively examine modeling approximations and hypotheses, identify dominant processes, assess data worth and uncertainty, calibrate and validate the numerical representation, and experiment in real time with environmental sampling, management, and remedial options.

 The new software technology allows the students thought processes to progress naturally and intuitively with the correct information visualized, analyzed, overlaid, and compared at the instant it is required, providing a real sense of continuous active exploration and engaged problem solving. Being able to watch natural subsurface flow, transport, and chemical processes evolve over time and visualize instantaneously the complex interrelationships among hydrological and environmental variables sparks pivotal insights, giving rise to an intuitive grasp of the hydrogeological and chemical processes that can't be readily obtained otherwise.

 The interactive environment is intuitive, illustrative, meaningful, and revealing. It is an enabling technology. The software offers a method of seeing the unseen and understanding the invisible. It enriches the process of teaching and learning, and brings professional investigation and scientific discovery into the classroom.

 Curriculum Innovations

 Specifically, the new software tool can be used to enhance teaching and learning in a significant number of courses across a water resources and environmental engineering curriculum both at graduate and undergraduate levels (see Table 1):

In particular, the software allows a student to interact with and instantly visualize aquifer flow, well dynamics, groundwater and surface water connections, contaminant advection, diffusion, dispersion, sorption, retardation, and decay under different geological, hydrological, hydraulic, and chemical conditions interactively and graphically specified by students. The software can be used to vividly illustrate and investigate the effect of natural variability, the interaction of different scales of heterogeneities, the interactions among geological, chemical, and hydrological heterogeneity on flow and pollutant migration, and how these heterogeneities and their interactions may significantly complicate groundwater remediation. The software also provides an interactive environment for students to perform statistical data analysis, site characterization, geological mapping, pump test analysis and design, well capture zone design, wellhead protection area delineation, monitoring network and remediation extraction system design under meaningful conditions.

Additionally, the software environment can be used to teach computational mathematics and statistical and probabilistic methods in water resources and environmental engineering. Teaching fundamentals and quantitative theory has always been a major challenge in an applied engineering discipline. Theoretical equations are often deemed abstract and numerical schemes dry. Many do not see how solving differential equations can be related to cleaning up groundwater contamination. Within the new interactive environment, mathematics becomes concrete and differential equations become meaningful. Students can interact and experiment hands-on with the model solvers, algorithms, and solution techniques for a concrete and physically meaningful situation and instantly visualize their practical implications (e.g., the impact of solver selection on the rate of the predicted plume spreading).  Students can visualize on-line the process of matrix solution and iterations of nonlinear differential equations. They can compare different methods for solving sparse matrix systems and different discretization schemes for approximating elliptic, hyperbolic, and parabolic partial differential equations. They can visually observe the effect of grid spacing and time steps on the solution accuracy and the effect of numerical dispersion and spurious oscillations. Students can also interactively learn, investigate and visualize statistics and probability and conditional probability within a meaningful engineering context (e.g., what is the probability that the advancing TCE plume may hit the community wells with a concentration exceeding the EPA standard?). They can interact with and visualize the techniques of numerical integration (particle tracking), spatial interpolation, statistical regression and interpolation, spatial data analysis, histogram and correlation and variogram modeling, random field generation, conditional geostatistical simulation, Monte Carlo simulation, and conditional Monte Carlo simulation. Within the new real-time interactive environment, abstract numerics, statistics, and stochastics come alive!

Most importantly, the software environment can be used as a collaborative work platform. It is not just a modeling, analysis, visualization, and presentation media. By providing instantaneous feedback, and making a student thinking explicit, visible, and understandable to all in a naturally expressive manner, the software is ideal for effective interdisciplinary interactions, collaborative learning, communication, for involving others with different skills and cultural backgrounds in sharing information, brainstorming, and developing ideas.

Collaboration is working together to accomplish shared site investigation goals.  In this case, the computer screen becomes a virtual experimental field site or testing ground. The classroom becomes a knowledge-building learning community.  Acting as investigators and working in teams, students confront tangible practical problems - e.g., cleaning up an accidental spill, evaluating the environmental impact of a landfill, developing a wellhead protection program for a municipal wellfield, conducting a remedial and feasibility study for a hazardous waste site, or providing expert testimony in a legal dispute.  Students learn by conducting guided site investigations and solving authentic problems.  Since the students lack significant information and experience, they will ask questions.  When adopting the new instructional model, we expect the stock queries Why do we need to know this??or Which equation should we use to solve the problem??to be replaced by new and more relevant questions such as:

 Where is the plume of contamination and what is in it?

What data do we need to collect to find the plume and characterize it?

Where is the optimal place to install a monitoring well? 

Why is our model inconsistent with our observations? 

How can we modify our conceptual representation to explain the data and improve our understanding? 

Through these questions, called learning issues, students become responsible for their own learning. The students tap into their creative resources and they develop direction and focus. Working in groups, they discuss the monitoring issues, report back, present findings, challenge and debate each other, explain their points of view, and search for cleanup strategies that build on the strengths of all the group members.  In this setting, the instructor becomes a mentor, a facilitator, a co-learner, and a co-investigator with the student. The instructor moves among groups, directing students' discussions and energies when appropriate.  The instructor provides coaching and support.  At critical times the instructor teaches students the skills, strategies, and links they need to complete the tasks they define for themselves.  Rather than simply lecture, the instructor instead cultivates skills, focuses effort, fosters resourcefulness, and maintains an interactive climate of learning, exploration, and discovery.

 Independent Projects.  The interactive groundwater environment can also be used for students to conduct independent projects and facilitate independent and deep thinking and individualized learning. Students on today's university campus are increasingly diverse (NSF, 1995, 1998). They have different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, cultural origins, learning styles, family responsibilities and personalities. The software allows maximizing teaching and learning for all students by providing a platform for students to engage in independent site investigation.  Students may start an individual project in the classroom and finish the bulk of the investigation at home or wherever a computer is connected to the network.  In an independent project, a student works on a site by him/herself to accomplish learning goals. Individual projects complement the collaborative and have many advantages.  They can:

 take into account variations in student learning styles as well as ability, background and cultural origins; 

allow students to go as far as they can at their own pace and at the place they choose; 

provide variable time and flexible schedules that enhances quality and in-depth study; 

provide incentives for self-direction, self-motivation, and self-activity; 

promote independent thinking and reduce reliance upon the instructor; and, 

provide self-motivated learning that may continue throughout life: Slow students are seldom discouraged and the gifted are rarely bored.