IF HYDROGEOLOGY 101 IS A PU PU PLATTER, CAN MODELING FIT ON THE PLATE?

Many faculty use Hydro 101 to introduce students to fundamental concepts and principles and to whet their appetites for material in upper level hydro courses. The comprehensive nature of introductory textbooks requires faculty to pick topics that fit into the academic calendar, local geologic setting, and their personal preferences, experiences, and comfort zones. Many faculty likely would agree to a set of core topics that includes the hydrologic cycle and budget, Darcy's Law, hydraulic head, potentiometric maps, hydrostratigraphy, flow nets, well hydraulics, regional hydrodynamics, aqueous chemistry, and contaminant transport. In teaching each of these topics within a one semester (one quarter) course, we make an assessment of the student learning curve for each topic so a balance is maintained between the amount of class time + student effort expended on a topic and the level of understanding gained by teaching it. Within the framework of a Hydro 101 course, modeling is often considered one of those topics in which the level of knowledge gained by students is not proportional to the classroom time and student effort expended. Yet modeling is one of the topics that faculty and students find interesting because of its application to real-world problems and its use of computers and graphic technologies. The authors developed an interactive EXCEL spreadsheet and an interesting assignment for use in Hydro 101 courses. The spreadsheet requires no special knowledge to input data or solve equations and contains help screens. The goals of the assignment are to teach students how scientists use models within the context of the scientific method to test hypotheses and what scientists consider a realistic model. The assignment deals with the use of models by expert witnesses in the landmark “A Civil Action” trial. The spreadsheet and the assignment are available on the SERC ‘Teaching Hydrogeology in the 21st Century' website.