Lesson Plans

Environmental Monitoring

Summary

Grade Range

6th-8th

Group Size

3-4 students

Active Time

6-8 hours

Total Time

6-8 hours

Area of Science

Environmental Science

Electricity & Electronics

Key Concepts

Human impact on the environment, electrical circuits, engineering

Credits

Ben Finio, PhD, Science Buddies

Leads of a multimeter attach to two aluminum foil props placed in the soil

Overview

Does human activity impact the environment? If so, how can we measure our impact on the environment? How can we use these measurements to change our behavior? In this project, your students will explore these questions by designing and building an electronic circuit that can measure environmental parameters like water quality or light pollution.

Learning Objectives

Design, build, and test an environmental monitoring circuit
Understand how human activity impacts the environmental variable that the circuit monitors
Explain how information from the monitoring circuit can be acted on to minimize human impact on the environment

NGSS Alignment

This lesson helps students prepare for these Next Generation Science Standards Performance Expectations:

MS-ESS3-3. Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.

This lesson focuses on these aspects of NGSS Three Dimensional Learning:

Science & Engineering Practices	Disciplinary Core Ideas	Crosscutting Concepts
Science & Engineering Practices	Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions. Apply scientific principles to design an object, tool, process, or system. Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information. Communicate scientific and/or technical information (e.g. about a proposed object, tool, process, system) in writing and/or through oral presentations.	Disciplinary Core Ideas	ESS3.C: Human Impacts on Earth Systems. Human activities have significantly altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species. But changes to Earth's environments can have different impacts (negative and positive) for different living things.	Crosscutting Concepts	Influence of Science, Engineering, and Technology on Society and the Natural World. All human activity draws on natural resources and has both short and long-term consequences, positive as well as negative, for the health of people and the natural environment.

Materials

Each group of students will need:

Electronic Sensors Kit, available from our partner Home Science Tools.
Additional materials depending on which project they choose. Please read the Teacher Prep section, which describes the different options in more detail, so you can decide what materials to make available to your students. Examples include (but are not limited to):
- Tubs of water
- Popsicle sticks and aluminum foil to make moisture probes
- Potted plants or dirt
- Flashlights
- Aquarium or pond water
- Small, clear, plastic cups for water samples
- Cardboard boxes
- Tape
- Scissors
- Bromothymol Blue Indicator solution 0.04% (w/v); available from Amazon.com. Changes color depending on pH of water.

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Background Information for Teachers

This section contains a quick review for teachers of the science and concepts covered in this lesson.

Human activity can impact the environment in a variety of ways, ranging from air or water pollution to the destruction of animal habitats. This lesson plan will allow your students to explore how some of these impacts can be measured electronically using the parts in the Electronic Sensors Kit. You can decide whether you would like your students to choose from the following suggested topics, think of their own topic, or focus on a single activity for the entire class. Links to related Science Buddies project ideas provide more background information about each topic.

Light pollution/air quality: the kit contains a light sensor called a photoresistor. A photoresistor is a type of resistor whose resistance depends on light. This resistance can be measured with a multimeter and used to determine the brightness of a light source like in the projects How Does the Intensity of Light Change with Distance? or How Bright Is Your Glow Stick? Measure It!. You can measure how airborne particulate matter (smog, smoke, etc.) affects the light sensor reading, or how artificial lighting affects the light sensor reading outdoors at night. How does human activity impact light levels? How does this change in light affect plant and animal life?
Water quality: you can also use the light sensor to measure water quality. How much light water absorbs depends on its color (darker water will absorb more light). The projects How Do You Take Your Tea? Make a Simple Electronic Device to Measure the Strength of Tea, How Blue is Your Sports Drink? and Adsorption: Dyeing Fabrics with Kool-Aid all make use of this fact. Water with suspended particles will scatter more light, as shown in From Turbid to Clear: How Flocculation Cleans Up Drinking Water. You can even use chemical reactions to cause water's color to change based on its pH, as shown in Get Energized with Cellular Respiration! and Dealing with Diabetes: The Road to Developing an Artificial Pancreas. Can your students use this information to measure water samples from a classroom aquarium or a local body of water? How does human activity affect the water quality?
Conductivity meter: the chemical makeup and moisture content of a material can influence its electrical conductivity. The project Electrolyte Challenge: Orange Juice Vs. Sports Drink explores this phenomena with sports drinks and electrolytes, but you could do this experiment with wet soil instead. How does the soil's moisture content affect its conductivity? How does human activity like deforestation or irrigation affect soil moisture, and what effect does this have on plant and animal life?
Water level detector: a circuit can be used to detect the presence (or absence) of water, as shown in Green Technology: Build an Electronic Soil Moisture Sensor to Conserve Water. This can be useful in a house, for example to detect an overflowing sink or a flooding basement. What about monitoring water levels in the environment? For example, detecting whether a pond has dried up, a reservoir is full, or a river has overflowed its banks? How does human water consumption affect water levels in the environment?

This is a very open-ended lesson. While there are specific instructions for building each circuit, how they use the circuit will be up to the students. Depending on your students' prior knowledge, you will need to decide what material you cover in class and/or what you assign as background reading material.

Note: Depending on the project(s) you select, you and your students will need to be comfortable using a multimeter and/or a breadboard. You will also need a beginner-level understanding of electrical terms like voltage, current, and resistance, as well as their respective units (volts, amperes, and ohms) and metric prefixes (m for milli, k for kilo, etc.).