A Stick in the Mud: Evaluating a Landscape
Science Topic: Landforms
Engineering Field: Geotechnical Engineering
Country: Nepal
Storybook: Suman Crosses the Karnali River
This unit takes students to Nepal, where the real-life TarPul Project (an Ecosystems, Ltd., project) helps ensure that people in monsoon-prone areas don’t get stranded on one side of a flooded river. After meeting storybook character Suman, who worries about how his ailing grandmother will receive health care from the clinic across the river when the flood season comes, students appreciate how important it is to find a safe, flood- and erosion-proof site for the innovative Tarpul river-crossing cable system.
Digging into the role of geotechnical engineers, students use models to represent a larger, real-life riverbank system and see how different factors impact a TarPul. Students’ objective: Use the Engineering Design Process to select and recommend to villagers a TarPul site, even though each site has advantages and disadvantages based on several factors.
To meet the goal, students must run tests on the models to determine the ideal soil base for a TarPul site, explore the costs and benefits of changing the soil to make it more suitable for building, examine maps to consider various sites’ potentials for eroding in the next flood, and weigh the villagers’ traditional preferences for the Tarpul’s location. In the end, each student team must make a choice in the midst of some realistic ambiguity and justify its recommendations.
GEMS Connection: Dig In!: Hands-On Soil Investigations
FOSS Connection: Landforms
STC Connection: Land and Water
Insights Connection: Reading the Environment
Click here for an overview of the unit.
Click here for a unit summary chart.
