By T.J. Hug
The Village Reporter
Water.
It’s the source of all life on Earth. Going through a single day without it is unfathomable for many people. Even those with elite survival skills would struggle to survive after a mere four days in the absence of the essential substance.
So what would happen if most of the planet’s water suddenly became contaminated?
That’s the issue the students at North Central Junior and Senior High School set out to solve.
A yearly effort for the school, North Central again held its Problem Based Learning exercise last week. The point of Problem Based Learning (PBL) is to present students with real world problems, giving them a chance to find a solution on their own terms. There is no one correct answer to a situation assigned for a PBL exercise.
For this year’s PBL experience, Principal Tim Rettig chose to address a recent crisis that hit close to home and was fresh in the minds of the students; The Toledo Water Crisis. The idea was recommended to Rettig while on a field trip to Stone Labs, an Ohio State University Lake Research facility located on Gibralter Island in Lake Erie.
“It was the best field trip I’ve ever been on, by far.” Rettig reminisced.
It was here that another school employee suggested that the school should do something with the lake for PBL. Before this recommendation, Rettig was going to have the students construct bridges. The new idea quickly overtook that plan.
Students were charged with creating filters capable of cleaning contaminated water. They approached the problem in groups, testing their unique designs in the school’s auditorium.
The results?
Most attempts, particularly those undertaken by the junior high and high school underclassmen, did an average job of filtering the contaminants from the water. Out of a 20 point scale, with higher numbers signifying greater degrees of decontamination, a majority of these younger groups scored between an eight and a ten. The most successful junior class groups all produced a score of eleven.
But it was the senior class that saw the most success. Two separate sets of collaborators created filters which scored a seventeen on the rubric. The first group to do so consisted of Reese Cogswell, Brady Zuver, Alaina Kemarly, and Jakob Grodi, while the second was comprised of Samantha Hughes-Vassar, Kirby Miller, Adam Knepper, Joel VanDyke, and Rachel Shipman.
As a reward for completing the assignment, the students were allowed to select teacher to take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge, which involves its participants to have a bucket of ice cold water dumped on their head. Rettig and Dean of Students Don Slamka volunteered to take part in the challenge, while the students selected science teachers Adam Parrott and Ben Wright, along with english instructor Mary Boots and social studies educator Brady Ruffer. The kids themselves were the ones to douse their teachers in the freezing liquid.
An interesting and fun experiment, North Central’s PBL experience would have to be considered a rousing success. Its participants learned much, and they got to make their teachers suffer a bit, all in the span of two hours.
It’s enough to make someone awfully thirsty.
T.J. Hug can be reached at
publisher@thevillagereporter.com