Water: An Interdisciplinary Journey

Dr. Bayers and Steffen developed and delivered an interdisciplinary upper division honors course on water in the Fall 2013. Why Water? Why Now? And What did we do? This poster will present an overview of how the course was developed, what we had students do, and how they responded. Water is essential for life. Water can bring horrible death and destruction. Water is both everywhere and invisible in our modern world. This course explored the nature of water as a physical substance (Why does NASA spend millions looking everywhere for it?) and as a metaphor for living. Weaving together political science (who owns water?), literature (Hetch Hetchy, Land of Little Rain, sacred texts), cinema (NOVA-Earth From Space, Rango, others), and field trips to local watersheds, this course challenged students to come to a deeper understanding of how critical water is for human civilization and how viewing it from different perspectives allows for a fuller understanding of its importance. We will describe how the course was structured, challenges we faced, and the student response to this course

A Cloud-Based Scavenger Hunt: Orienting Undergraduates to ACS National Meetings

American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meetings are valuable for the development of undergraduate researchers but can be overwhelming for first-time attendees. To orient and engage students with the range of offerings at an ACS meeting, we developed a cloud-based scavenger hunt. Using their mobile devices, teams of undergraduates “scavenged” items off a list by uploading “selfies” to designated folders within Google Drive, a cloud-based storage system. Time stamps offered by the cloud afforded real-time evidence of student participation. Items on the scavenger hunt were designed to integrate undergraduates into the meeting, exposing them to distinguished scientists, leading publishers, and instrument manufacturers as well as to networking opportunities. We employed this selfie-based scavenger hunt at three ACS National Meetings (Philadelphia, 2012; Boston, 2015; Philadelphia, 2016). Students reported that the scavenger hunt contributed to their learning. The cloud-based scavenger hunt is versatile and can be easily adapted for other constituencies (e.g., high school or international students) or events (e.g., regional meetings or first-year orientations)

A Cloud-Based Scavenger Hunt: Orienting Undergraduates to ACS National Meetings

American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meetings are valuable for the development of undergraduate researchers but can be overwhelming for first-time attendees. To orient and engage students with the range of offerings at an ACS meeting, we developed a cloud-based scavenger hunt. Using their mobile devices, teams of undergraduates “scavenged” items off a list by uploading “selfies” to designated folders within Google Drive, a cloud-based storage system. Time stamps offered by the cloud afforded real-time evidence of student participation. Items on the scavenger hunt were designed to integrate undergraduates into the meeting, exposing them to distinguished scientists, leading publishers, and instrument manufacturers as well as to networking opportunities. We employed this selfie-based scavenger hunt at three ACS National Meetings (Philadelphia, 2012; Boston, 2015; Philadelphia, 2016). Students reported that the scavenger hunt contributed to their learning. The cloud-based scavenger hunt is versatile and can be easily adapted for other constituencies (e.g., high school or international students) or events (e.g., regional meetings or first-year orientations)