This week rather than going out to experience a new aspect of campus the experience came to our classroom. Dr. Colleen Naughton visited our classroom, along with multiple members of her lab group, to present research done by the FEWS-US lab, the Food-Energy-Water Systems for the UnderServed Lab. Dr. Naughton and her team have a particular focus on water treatment for a contaminant, 1,2,3 - TCP Trichloropropane (TCP), within our drinking water. They helped educate the class on what they do within their lab, as well as the importance of their work. Filtering out substances such as 1,2,3-TCP is vital. The substance is a suspected human carcinogen and is dangerous in concentrations greater than 5 parts per trillion. That's about 5 eye drops in 20 Olympic swimming pools.
To help illustrate the principles that their lab worked with Dr. Colleen and her team members provided us with a hands-on demonstration we could participate in in class. The class was split up into groups and given a number of materials ranging from sand to cotton balls. The groups were then instructed to build a filter using up to three of these materials to try and filter a “pollutant”. The pollutant was a mixture of water, turmeric, vinegar, soil, and dust. After each group built their filters they poured the “pollutant” in and after filtration were instructed on some simple non-laboratory observations they could use to see how effective the materials they chose. With the excess time and materials every group was able to repeat the experiment multiple times, slowly refining and learning from attempts till nearly all the samples were clear and did not have an unusual smell.
Overall, this week's “trip” was very interesting. We never left the classroom, but instead had the trip come to us. It would be difficult to take a trip into a laboratory setting, but turning our classroom into a pseudo-lab accomplished a very similar learning outcome, and really helped to engage everyone into learning the principles behind pollutants and filtration
