Activity 1: How is mathematics a tool in the real world?
As an opening activity, students should be introduced to the questions, “what is a watershed?” , “why do we care?” , and “where does our water go?”. An opening activity to introduce the allocation of water resources is to hold a debate about the pros versus cons of human diversion of water because of dams. Some of the pros that students can consider is recreational use, flood control (downstream), irrigation, hydroelectric power capability, and an evening out of flow throughout the year. However, there are many negative impacts that dams cause, including change in ecosystems, flooding upstream, delta starvation, prevention of fish migration, and the evening out of flow during the year, which prevents sediment renewal on the floodplain. While it is not directly related to what we will be studying in the unit, it serves as a hook to get students interested and thinking about the water in our watersheds and how we allocate it.
From there, students can be introduced to the watershed using the idea of budgets and balancing a checkbook - the amount of water you take from your wallet can not exceed the amount of money that is put in.
Activity 2: Math talk
There is an opportunity to have concrete discussions surrounding conceptual mathematical topics when the real life application is considered. For example, as referenced above, students can consider things such as “temperature vs evaporation” or “precipitation vs. discharge”, and which one makes sense as an independent and dependent variable. Also they should consider the question, “what is an equation?”, and compare the idea with balancing water budget equations with solving for x.
By including a real world scenario, it allows students to form a conceptual understanding of slope, especially constant slope. Students can make the connection that the more water enters the system through precipitation, the heavier the discharge of the system is in a constant fashion.
Activity three: Diving into real world data
Have students recreate the data using different data sets representing watersheds from various climates. Students can repeat the process of creating linear regressions which model their data, but will have to apply their analysis skills to form new and unique interpretations about the climate of their watershed.
Next, students can compare their watersheds against the other unique watershed data in the classroom to further strengthen their analysis skills of the graphs. Students can examine the meaning of various steepness in slopes of their line, and they can see if every watershed has a strong correlation.