Unplanned Lesson: An Outdoor Project Reacts to Oil Spill
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| Audience/Grade: | 6 - High School Senior |
| Discipline(s): |
Environmental Engineering General Engineering, Engineering Science Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Ocean Engineering Petroleum Engineering |
| Special Topic(s): | |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - Article/Document |
| Media Type: |
Unknown |
| Author(s): |
Traci Vogel |
| Description: | The day after an environmental disaster in San Francisco Bay, students visiting the Crissy Field Center learn how feathers respond to oil. Edutopia story on creating lesson plans out of unplanned events. Excerpt: "Thursday, November 8, 2007, was not a typical day at the Crissy Field Center. The day before, a tanker had hit the base of one of the towers of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel, a noxious form of oil. By the following morning, police barricades and caution tape blocked off access to the beach. Yellow "booms" crisscrossed the sands to keep oil from washing up, and "No Swimming" signs dotted the typically idyllic walkway that runs from the city's bustling Marina District out to the pastoral restored shoreline that parallels the urban national park known as the Presidio. The kids in the Crissy Field Center's blue-and-green-walled multimedia lab are anxious. "What do we do now?" asks a boy, slouched in a black sweatshirt. "Are we still going to get to go outside?" a girl asks in between sending text messages on her cell phone. The teachers are a little worried, too. They've had just a few hours to prepare today's alternate lesson. It turns out, though, that the oil spill fits right into the curriculum for high school educator Lisa Franzen's fourteen students, who come to the Crissy Field Center for two hours and forty minutes of environmental science once a week as part of a program called Project WISE (Watersheds Inspiring Student Education)." Image caption: Solutions in Water: Students engage in authentic problem-based science lessons at the Crissy Field Center's Urban Ecology Lab. Credit: Courtesy of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | Crissy Field Center Presidio Project WISE watersheds oil spill environmental disaster |
| Is Component of: |
Edutopia - The George Lukas Foundation Educational Website and Newsletter |
| Usage Tip | |
| Related ABET Criteria: |
(h) Understand global, economic, environmental, and societal context |
| Use of Resource: |
The U.S. National Park Service has long been dedicated to education and interpretation, offering teachers curricula and providing learning opportunities for kids. The Crissy Field Center, which opened in 2001, has taken this idea a step further, getting kids involved in conservation, archeology, botany, history, and leadership through hands-on classes that use the natural resources of the Presidio and high tech tools. The center houses a multimedia lab, a resource library, a science lab, a teaching kitchen, an arts workshop, a cafe, and a bookstore. In the past six years, more than 400,000 students have taken advantage of its programs. |
| Difficulty: |
Easy |
| Interactivity Level: |
Low |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | June 2010 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.edutopia.org/project-wise-environmental-science |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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