Splish, Splash,
I was Taking a Bath
Kim Cerrudo, Science Teacher
Petoskey High School
2885 Atkins Road, Petoskey, MI 49770
Home (231)487-0540
This summer I had the opportunity to attend Island Hopping Across the Curriculum 2001, an Educators' Science and Mathematics Institute Series (ESMIS) offered by Michigan Technological University. The course was a wonderful chance to experience inquiry-based learning at its finest while also sharing teaching ideas with fifteen other teachers from throughout the state of Michigan. The course took place along the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and North and South Manitou Islands. For information describing the dunes and islands, visit www.nps.gov/slbe. It was after my second morning on South Manitou Island that I received the inspiration for the following unit.
I share a few notes from my journal. "Concern and wonder? What are the effects of camp soaps, shampoos, dish soaps, tooth pastes, and other products on the environment? Each morning I have gone to the lake for a swim and this morning noticed an algal growth 3 meters from shore in 0.5 m deep water. The growth covered a 3 meter wide swath. I walked from our site and it continued around the bay to about 200 meters up the beach. It tapered off gradually as I neared the old boat dock, an area beyond the camp sites boundary. The algal growth continued south as well. I noticed similar algae at the boat dock when we were leaving. Perhaps Spirogyra." The algal growth I observed seemed to correspond with the camp sites and well inhabited areas of the island. Throughout my visit, I had observed on different occasions, campers soaping up with camp soaps and then swimming in the lake. I wondered if there was a connection. I also noticed a few sailboats docked in the area.
In recent years national parks are visited by nearly 300 million visitors yearly. Concerns have been raised that we are loving our parks to death. I am not sure who first coined this phrase, but it has become quite popular. Type it in as you search the Internet and many occurrences will appear. I found this paragraph in a site that listed National Park Service jobs and the history of the park service. "Claiming that "parks are for people," recreational and tourist industry interests have argued for increased access and more concessions catering to visitors. Backing up those interests are the many visitors who expect modern amenities and comforts when they visit park lands. Environmentalists argue that intrusive human impact should be limited in order to best preserve the parks. Pointing to traffic jams and fast-food restaurants in Yosemite and Yellowstone, they argue that unless human impact is minimized, careless visitors will "love the parks to death." (http://www.jobmonkey.com/parks/html/national_park_service.html)
During our visit, one of the park rangers on South Manitou described a similar debate shaping current policy. Should North and South Manitou Islands be returned to their wilderness status by removing all sources of public drinking water and pit toilets? True, they would be returned to the primitive status of an earlier time, but would the burial of human waste throughout the island, especially concentrated in the camping areas create a greater problem then the pit toilets? Would this then lead to problems with the water supply? Questions that certainly need to be raised and addressed.
In a note from Henry Fansler, the chair of the Foothills Group of the Sierra Club, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, "Our parks, and our public forests, monuments, or whatever, help all of us to participate in John Muir's ideas represented by the Sierra Club's goal to "explore, enjoy, and protect the planet". They belong to all of us and deserve our attention and protection." (http://sierraclub-nc.org/foothills/chair.html)
I, too, would like to raise the awareness of my students of how their actions affect the environment around them. When they visit a natural area, I would like them to minimize their impact as much as possible. I would also like them to become questioning consumers. For example, what does biodegradable really mean? If a bottle of shampoo says that it is biodegradable, does that mean that it is safe to go directly into our water supply?
In talking with other teachers in my group, two became very excited and shared similar concerns, and together we designed a unit to explore these ideas, as well as the scientific method, across three different classrooms. It was planned that students work together in teams, communicate by internet, to share results and design experiments to seek answers to new questions that resulted from their original experiments.
To introduce the unit and help make students aware of their surroundings, I showed them a series of digital images I had taken on a trip around northern Michigan. My daughter and I traveled to Wilderness State Park, the Cheboygan State Park, Lake Catherine and other scenic areas around northern Michigan. Slides emphasized the beauty of our natural resources, but also included images showing examples of human impacts (pollution, zebra mussels, piping plovers). I compiled a digital slide show using GLUON PresenterActive, a program that allowed me to dissolve one slide into the next while coordinating to music. I checked out a video projector from the library to enhance the presentation. After watching the slide show, students were asked to note as many signs of human impact, both positive and negative, from the images that they could remember. This was an idea I took from a web site called Parks Victoria Activities (www.parkseducation.org/tourism). Students were excited about our new technology in place and enjoyed the presentation. This led into a discussion of my own experiences on South Manitou Island. Students then designed experiments using the following procedure.
Procedure for Each Group of Students
1. Fill four two liter pop or soda bottles with hot water. Let sit for a few minutes to allow glue to warm up. Then remove label. Remaining glue can be removed with Goo Gone, but use sparingly in a well-ventilated area.
2. Punch a hole with a probe near the top of a 2 liter bottle. Using a pair of scissors, cut around the top, just before it starts to taper, to shape a small aquarium.
3. Clean the aquarium and rinse thoroughly.
4. Fill each bottle with 1.5L lake water. One bottle will be the control and nothing further will be added.
5. Select the product type your group would like to focus on for the first phase of testing; shampoo, soap, or dish soap. Then choose three brands of the product you would like to test.
6. The remaining three bottles will be experimental groups. To each bottle, add a few drops of the solution being tested.
7. Place all four bottles under the full spectrum light. Lights are set on a timer to turn on at 5:00 a.m. and off at 10:00 p.m. to simulate light exposure for late June at approximately 45 degrees latitude.
8. Daily stir the bottles with a stirring rod to aerate.
9. At the end of two weeks, scrape the sides of each bottle to loosen algal growth. Wash sides of bottle and stirring rod to make sure all algae ends up in solution.
10. Label four clean 250mL beakers. Mass each empty beaker and record.
11. With a long stirring rod, stir each bottle for 20 seconds and then if sand is not present, immediately pour 100mL of the solution into one of the pre-massed 250 mL beakers. If sand is present, wait 20 seconds and then pour. Repeat this step for the remaining three bottles.
12. Place in fume hood and evaporate water. When all water is removed, mass and record. Return the beaker to the hood for 24 hours or place in drying oven to remove any remaining water. Mass and record. If mass declines, repeat. If it is constant, compare results and draw conclusion.
After two weeks, students took final observations and prepared to analyze results. The following samples showed evidence of algal growth: Palmolive, Shout laundry stain remover, Crest, Aquafresh, Head and Shoulders, two control groups. Greenest samples were the Crest and Aquafresh toothpaste containers. Most samples tested did not promote algae growth though several made the water cloudy. These included: Spartan dish soap, Suave shampoo, All laundry soap, Tide laundry soap, Dove, Lever, American Fare, Colgate toothpaste, Zest, Oil of Olay, Herbal Essence, Pantene, Willow Lake, Willow, ThermaSilk, school hand soap, Clairol Pro-V, eight control groups. Soft Soap showed mixed results.
We quickly realized that most samples did not have a significant amounts of algae. There was concern that some of the results contained soap particles and not algae and that this would throw off results. Also some groups chose to filter the water through filter paper and then evaporate the sample. This was a slow process as well and did not seem to contribute to improved results. Ultimately at this level, it became most valuable to observe.
I discussed the process of writing an abstract and students worked on abstracts in their groups. A sample abstract follows.
Abstract
We tested the affects of various cleansing products on Lake Michigan water. Specifically, Dove, Lever 2000, and American Fare Body Cleanser. In each of our bottles (excluding our control) three drops of one type of soap were stirred in. They were held under a light for a 14 day period, in which they were swirled once ever 24 hours Monday through Friday and left alone Saturday and Sunday. We found that our control was the same as it was in the beginning of our experiment. It was still clear with a few floating particles, but no apparent visual changes. There was also no evidence of any algae growth before or after. The American Fare Body Cleanser showed little change other than a slight increase in cloudiness. This could be due to chemical reactions within the water just like those you see in bath water. Also, the American Fare is advertised to be a sensitive skin cleanser. We believe for this reason, it caused less cloudiness due to absence of stronger chemicals used in fast lathering and scented soaps. The Dove and Lever 2000 showed the same qualitative results. They both had the same level of cloudiness and a small amount of organic matter floating within them. Change in the clarity of water however promoted no algae growth in either of these bottles. We filtered the water for the Dove. Its dry mass was 0.10 grams. We believe that according to qualitative results alone that American Fare (gentle cleanser) seems to be the most environmentally friendly causing little change in the appearance of the water.
Before and after pictures were included with each abstract. We are currently in the middle of a renovation and the technology was not in place to quickly implement this phase of the project. It took a week extra to compile all abstracts into a format that could be e-mailed to other schools. These were e-mailed, but unfortunately the two other teachers were experiencing technical difficulties beyond their control and we did not receive any abstracts until one set arrived the day before our video conference. At about the same time, I was pulled from my own classroom to cover for my department head's classes for the remainder of this semester. Unfortunately, it was not possible to finish the lesson as described. My students were unable to work with their teams from other schools and design and conduct an experiment to test the effectiveness of their plan and write a proposal to the National Park Service describing their findings and recommendations. It was for this combination of reasons that I did not administer the posttest or attitudinal surveys.
I greatly enjoyed working with the other teachers in this project, especially communicating on-line. Much was learned from this pioneer project and I would like to try it again in the future with technology in place on all sides. I think that my students would share the same benefits and excitement that I did collaborating on-line. I look forward to trying something similar in the future. The following standards from the Michigan Curriculum Framework were addressed:
Standards from Science
CS1.3 Design and conduct scientific investigations.
CS3.3 Describe general factors relating population size in an ecosystem.
CS3.4 Describe responses of an ecosystem that cause it to change.
CS3.5 Describe how nutrients cycle through an ecosystem.
Standards from Math
Data analysis and statistics - organize, interpret, and transform data into useful
knowledge to make predictions and decisions based on data.
Number sense and numeration - quantify and measure objects, represent ideas
in the language of mathematics
Standards from Social Studies
Geographic perspective: Human/environment interactions - characteristics of
ecosystems, resources, human adaptation, environmental impact, and
interrelationships among them
Standards from English
Depth of understanding - understanding of the complexity of enduring issues and recurring problems by making connections and generating themes within and
across texts ideas in action, inquiry and research
REFERENCES