Water Conservation Workshop – Water Aware Event for Secondary School Students at NUI Galway

This year Waternomics took part in the ever popular Engineers Week http://www.engineersweek.ie/ hosting a Water Aware Event for local Secondary School Students at NUI Galway. The event included both a Water Conservation Workshop and App Development Workshop both designed around the Waternomics Project.

Both workshops were run twice during the day with a total attendance of 40 students aged 13 – 17 years.

The water conservation workshop was designed to introduce students to the key aspects of the Waternomics Project and raise awareness of water as a resource and their own water usage.

To help students visualize the energy and effort that is required to produce clean potable water to our homes and schools students were asked to construct a model water treatment system from abstraction to end use, with hand pumps, sand filters, gravity flows etc. This made for a lively and messy workshop!

“…two pairs of students came up with two good project ideas for this years SciFest competition which will allow them also enter the BT Young Scientist competition a later in the year. So that’s a plus.”

Students were encouraged to consider the typical water usage of a secondary student in a day and consider ways in which they could reduce this volume and also use outcomes from this workshop in their school work.

“The group of students who are doing a project based on water flow under our school were talking to the chap in the hydrology lab and he gave them some formulas to use.”

The water conservation workshops were a great success with some students calculating that they could reduce their own water usage by up to 60%!

#Water conservation workshop by @waternomics_eu with #SchoolKids for @EngineerIreland @nuigalway @ict4water_eu pic.twitter.com/HUFOfUB94d

— Wassim Derguech (@derwas) March 1, 2016