Clean water through chemical engineering: Introducing K-12 students to ChE using filtration

The authors have developed a lesson plan on water filtration to introduce K-12 students to chemical engineering through hands-on activities. The primary motivation for developing the lesson was to hook K-12 students into the societal impact of chemical engineering in addressing the grand challenge of providing access to clean water. Our secondary motivation was to develop outreach materials related to our research on transport in pores and microchannels. The full plan was developed as part of a graduate course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on science and engineering outreach in consultation with middle school teachers and tested in middle school classrooms and an after school program in a Boys & Girls Club. Activities from the lesson plan have been used separately in several outreach activities since 2011 including multiple Girl Scout events for 6th-12th graders, a professional development workshop for K-12 science teachers, and a summer camp for 4th-8th graders and their grandparents. The lesson begins with a discussion of challenges of purifying polluted water and drinking water supplies in developing nations. Then a series of activities demonstrate how chemical engineering principles and technologies are effective in cleaning water and how they can be used to enhance access to purified drinking water. This lesson is designed to be completed in one 1-hour period with two experiments and one physical activity. For more mature students, an inquiry-based experimental activity for designing a new filter is also provided. The goal of this paper is to disseminate the lesson plan and all the associated documentation to other educators and to provide some ideas for adapting the lesson to a variety of audiences.