Very nice combination of Citizen Science and gaming/modeling activities! I’m curious about the data underlying the model and the algorithms that allow students to manipulate their own watershed characteristics. Did you develop these or were they off-the-shelf? Also, have you created any assessments or done any evaluation of Model My Watershed to determine what scientific content and principles are being addressed (e.g. alignment with national science standards)? Finally, is this publicly available? I would love to try it out!

Kevin – Thank you for the post.

The application was developed by scientists at the Stroud Water Research Center (http://www.stroudcenter.org/about/aufdenkampe.shtm) and GIS experts at Azavea (Robert Cheatum – http://www.azavea.com) The application was built from the ground up using national data sets and watershed models.
MMW version 1 was Java based. It went offline in March, 2015 so that we could update it to run on tablets.
The application is FREE and available to anyone. You can find it in June 2015 at concord.org/tes-mmw or wikiwatershed.org
The curriculum is aligned to NGSS. Results of our pilot study can be found at: Gill, S & Marcum-Dietrich, N. (2014). Model My Watershed: Contextualizing problem-based and place-based geoscience learning within a sociocultural context. Journal of Geoscience Education.

Information about our current research efforts can be found at http://blogs.millersville.edu/tesmmw/research/

This sounds like a great modeling application and I very much enjoyed the video which brought it to life. Where is it being used? In or out of school? Does it complement particular curricula or is it a stand-alone? Love the fact that students are going outside and collecting their own data. Do students tend to work on it in teams or is it an individual thing? Can they share their data with students in different locations?

Very well done, enjoyed it

Joni,
This project is for the lower 48 states, so any of those states can join in! Teaching Environmental Sustainability project is being used in five states, CA, IA, KS, PA, and VA for research. Check out the curricula at http://concord.org/projects/teaching-environmen.... Students use a very inexpensive Watershed Tracker for humidity, temperature, light, and soil moisture that uses BlueTooth to record data remotely in an app (both Android and iOS). The activities complement already existing watershed curricula and students work in teams. By posting on the portal students can share among locations.

Nanette and Carolyn, what a wonderful project. I really like the depth that you make available for kids (and kids of all ages) to explore watersheds and understand key constructs. I will be looking forward to reports about its use and success. Also, we have a potentially complementary project called Mission HydroSci…..see the video labeled Distance Learning through game based 3d VLE. We ar ein the early stages of developing a game for kids to learn about water systems and apply scientific argumentation. regards.

This is a fascinating project, and it is wonderful the way the students can work in their own region. Are you keeping a record of what land use modifications students deploy during “Modify my Watershed?” I’d be interested to see what changes middle school students would be interested in making in their local landscape.

Also, does the hydrologic model work on averages only, or does it incorporate weather and seasonal changes in precip and air temp?

Finally, it might be interesting to make a version for high school or undergrad that incorporates droughts and changes in precip and air temp forecast to occur with global climate change.

I want to do this experiement, very interesting. I enjoyed watching this video and learning that this tool will be available in a variety of tools and not only on the school desktop computer. I want to play my watershed and find out how I too can conserve water by planning my own area of best practices of preventing too much runoff water. I am concern that major work went in to making a tool about one subject matter. Can it be modified to teach other skills in science, geography, or math? Usually a complete curriculum does not allow for teacher modification how will you ensure that many schools will buy into using this tool so that you can reach that 100% of school that can now use the technology which you stated was currently at 3% before the tool?

James –
Your Mission HydroSci project sounds exciting. I will definitely look at the video!
Nanette

I found your watershed modeling web-application to be exciting especially because it provides a holistic perspective that enables students and citizens to simulate and visualize storm-water runoff and water quality. I was wondering whether there is opportunity for any teacher across various states to be able to use this model? Will you be able to collect cumulative data of usage?