Newswise — Rowan University (Glassboro, N.J.) College of Engineering professors and students might not introduce South Jersey kids to Nemo or the Little Mermaid, but they just might introduce them to their future.
The college is part of a joint endeavor with the Adventure Aquarium, the New Jersey Academy of Aquatic Sciences (NJAAS) and Cumberland County College (CCC) to educate K-12 students about the science and engineering behind a seemingly simple aquarium.
The organizations will do that both at the Camden, N.J.-based aquarium/NJAAS and in classrooms across the region and possibly around the world thanks in part to a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
This fall, Dr. Kauser Jahan, the chair of Rowan's Civil and Environmental Engineering program and head of the aquarium project, is working with other Rowan faculty and two teams of students to develop instrumentation for a 100-gallon tank that will measure such things temperature, dissolved oxygen and pH levels; outfit the Discovery distance learning classroom at the aquarium/NJAAS; and develop hands-on activities, experiments, lectures and presentations that will be made available via the Internet for participants. They hope to have the program running by January, after which students will be able to learn about engineering fundamentals at the aquarium or via a website tied to the location that they can access from their classrooms.
"An aquarium is an exquisite combination of interacting systems that can be analyzed using multidisciplinary engineering and scientific principles. The aquarium connects engineering with an interactive, innovative and exciting application that appeals to a wide audience," said Jahan, who has been involved in K-12 engineering outreach for a decade. "This is a very visual, very fun way for youth to connect to engineering and become more aware of the field."
As part of the effort, the non-profit NJAAS, based at the aquarium, will offer an educational outreach program for K-12 students and teachers that will feature engineering concepts in the study of the 100-gallon aquarium it houses in the Discovery classroom. Rowan faculty will help prepare NJAAS personnel to teach these concepts.
NJAAS will provide real-time data and visuals of the aquarium accessible through its website (http://www.njaas.org) under the title "NJ-Quarium." This website will show a live web cam view of the aquarium, offer teachers of all grade levels access to recorded experiments NJAAS performs in the tank and provide real-time data for classroom analysis. Teachers will have the ability to download data from this site and help students plot and conduct statistical analyses where applicable. The NJAAS website also will include activities that are appropriate for adoption by K-12 educators and two-year colleges to use with the NJAAS aquarium.
The aquarium also will be a component of a freshman engineering clinic course at Rowan to study reverse engineering, a process in which students disassemble products to assess how they were engineered. And NJAAS will host a field trip for the Rowan freshmen to teach them about the water treatment processes at the aquarium.
Vineland, N.J.-based CCC, which is helping develop lessons for the program, will adopt experiments and modules developed for the Rowan freshman clinic and implement them in CCC's Introduction to Engineering course in an effort to make the transition easier for students entering the engineering program at Rowan from the county college.
"My goal is to have the engineering students adapt their experiments so they are able to be used on various educational levels," Jahan said. At the end of the spring semester, Jahan hopes to have the best engineering clinic team visit NJAAS and perform an experiment using the Discovery classroom. The entire experiment could then be viewed on the website by classrooms across the world.
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