Gigi Richard: Using Water Sustainability in Cities at the Colorado Mesa University

Unit 1 — Introduction

This unit felt a bit rushed in a 50-minute class period. Fortunately, the students were already somewhat familiar with the sustainability concepts presented in this unit. The new aspect was how to apply those concepts to urban water. Also, the students have the entire module to work on their mind maps, so they did not feel like they had to finish it today.

Outline of class period:

• (30 min) — Module overview and discussion of pre-class questions. Students had a lot to share and discuss and had been very thoughtful in their pre-class work.
• (5 min) — Had students write a definition of "water sustainability in cities." Paired up with neighbor to discuss. There was lots of discussion, but I did not have time to work toward a class definition with larger and larger groups.
• (5 min) — Discussed definition as a class and went over three other sustainability concepts. I had the pairs call out items/concepts that were key to their definitions and wrote them on the board. Then we looked at how they fit into the definitions in the PowerPoint.
• (10 min) — Discussed mind map of urban water system, handed out paper and markers, and student groups started on mind map of urban water system.
• (1 min) — Muddiest point. Students seemed to be very clear on these points. The three topics were well understood by most of the students in class.

Unit 2 — Urban Hydrology

Pre-class assignment - Created handout assigning reading and video, and listed terms and concepts to be familiar with before class. Included the quiz in the pre-class assignment. I did not have time to administer the quiz in class, and I did not have an LMS set up this semester. I thought it would be too confusing to start the LMS now.

Also, I eliminated the homework assignment because there is a lot of reading and material for Unit 3.

This class period was shorted because of student evaluations. Outline of class period:

• (10 min) We did a quick think-pair-share, which was too easy because this group already understood the impacts of impervious surfaces on infiltration rates and then groundwater flow (baseflow) and surface runoff.

• (15 min) Introduced water balance on the board by first just using a generic water system (block box for control volume), then using the example from the PowerPoint. I printed out four slides for the class so that I could write on the board and not have the projector on. I set up the example, but did not have time to do the unit conversions. I would recommend adding the units to the example problem where it is worked out.
• (5 min) Handed out the water balance homework problem. I set this up on the board so that they could see a picture of the system. Then, I had them divide into groups to conceptually set up the water balance for the reservoir (but not add in numbers). Then, we set it up on the board all together and talked about how to estimate each term. They will do this problem for homework for next Monday.

Unit 3 — Urban Water-Atmospheric Environment Interactions

Pre-class assignment - I created a handout with the pre-class questions. For background material, I gave them the animation, Seto & Shepherd, Dr. Shepherd's blog post about urban flooding and the ezine article about urban climate archipelagos.

Outline of class period:

• (10 min) — Reviewed the concepts from the pre-class questionnaire. I think students did well and had a good understanding of urban climate effects and the difference between UHIs and UCAs.
• (10 min) — Reviewed the water balance problem from Unit 2.
• (30 min) — Worked on the Climate Wizard activity. They did not finish, but were able to see some impacts of urban areas on temperature and precipitation.

Unit 4 — Landscape Water

I used two class periods for this unit. For the in-class activity, I only used a one-month time period, rather than the entire growing season. We did not have computers, so the hand-calculated version of this unit was used.

Outline of first class period:

• (10 min) — Quiz and discussion of pre-class material. Students seemed to understand the basic concepts and the ET graphs very well.
• (20 min) — Calculations for an entirely turf landscape were performed at the board with the whole class together, so they could see a run-through of how the calculations worked.
• (20 min) — Broke into groups and started working on planning their landscape design. I also handed out the rubric and discussed the criteria their designs will be evaluated on, including aesthetics. They seemed to be having good discussions about types of plants and options for where to put their turf, and strategies for hitting the 40% mark.

• Students worked in groups during the whole class period and completed their designs and calculations without rushing. They completed the discussion questions for homework.

A computer classroom is necessary for this unit. Because of only having a 50-minute class period, I eliminated the outdoor water use calculation from this unit. The students focused only on the indoor component.

Outline of class period:

• (20 min) — Discussed PowerPoint and pre-class questions.
• (30 min) — Students worked on their indoor water use calculations. They did not have enough time to complete their computations and to answer the discussion questions, so they finished it for homework.

Unit 6 was not used due to time constraints

Computers are necessary, and I had to have IT install the stormwater calculator in a computer lab. Be sure to do that in advance!

I used the quiz as a pre-class assignment, to free up more class time. Also, I did not use the PowerPoint and did not lecture. I jumped straight into demonstrating the Stormwater Calculator because I was worried that I would not have enough time, but we had plenty of time.

Outline of class period:

• (10 min) — I stepped the class through the input to the Stormwater Calculator for the baseline case. Then I explained what they needed to do to estimate the low-impact development runoff.
• (40 min) — Students worked on their own and had plenty of time to complete the assignment and the discussion questions.

Unit 8 — Impacts of Extreme Hydroclimatic Events

Because it was the end of the semester and the next unit was being used as the final exam, I did not use the post-assignment for Unit 8.

I adapted the material for this unit quite a bit to fit in a 50-minute class period. I created an exercise where the students are the city planner for a city and they need to estimate the flood runoff from a particular rain event using the rational equation. I did not use the PowerPoint. I just used the whiteboard and discussed what types of hydroclimatic extreme event might be of concern, the 10%-ile tail defines "extreme," discussed mag-freq relationship, how we define frequency (return period or probability—this was review for this group of students because we have talked about the relationship between magnitude and frequency all semester), and how magnitude for precipitation must include depth or intensity and duration. Introduced DDF and IDF curves. We did not have time to get into drought in-depth.

Unit 9 — Final Assessment

I did not have a lot of class time to devote to this, so I required that they each provide a short write up of how they would address the outdoor water use, indoor water use, storm water runoff, climate impacts, and extreme event issues for the proposed suburban development. The individual write-ups were due on the day of the final exam.

The five topics they needed to focus on came from tasks 3.1–3.5 in our final project handout.

Then, on the day of the final, in class, they had one hour as a group to formulate their plan for the development and to give a 5-minute presentation about their group plan. They used flip charts for their presentations (except one group used the document camera and drawings on 8.5x11 sheets).

Most groups did not address cost, or explicitly talk about sustainability. One group did a great job covering all of the topics. Another group got really into the outdoor water use computations and did not do much else, and the third group made a really pretty picture and did an okay job addressing all points and doing the calculations.