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This product, created for MIT 542-Internship, is a group of lesson plans on water conservation for middle and high school students. The lessons were created to accompany the video documentary Troubled Waters: The Illusion of Abundance, produced by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Office of Special Projects. These lesson plans were created for the educator's resource Web site being built to reinforce in the classroom the concepts covered in the video. These plans were constructed using as a model Roger Schank's Learning by Doing instructional design theory (Schank, 1999). The plans are designed to create goal-based scenarios in which students can investigate interdisciplinary concerns related to water conservation. They are designed to facilitate learning in a constructivist environment.

These lesson plans were created during the summer of 2003. The lessons were scheduled to be completed in time to launch the Web site at the same time as the video, in the fall of that year. Writers were able to work from home, contacting the video producers by email. the video producers had completed a thorough research of the Internet-based literature pertaining to water scarcity and presented the writers with a  list of Web sites to research. Writers also researched on their own to come up with other information. The lessons were prepared to be set into Web format by the wonderfully talented graphic designer, Cathi Phillips, who is the Web designer for this project.

This project was a joint effort to produce a multi-faceted educational experience for middle and high school students. The video combined with the educator's resources are designed to give learners easy access to information on water scarcity by video and online learning. The Web site that contains these lesson plans is available on the University of North Carolina at Wilmington Web site at http://www.uncw.edu/troubledwaters/. The educator's resource site is not yet available, but will stand as a ready resource for any students in the world who are interested and doing research in water conservation issues. The lesson plans I wrote will be presented in the design format chosen by the Web designer, over which I will have no control. The content of the lessons however, will be of my creation. 

The five lesson plans included here were created entirely by me. I worked with a team of other writers, each of whom designed their own lessons under the direction of the video' producer and assistant producer. My role was to research resources, both found on my own and provided by the production team, familiarize myself with the issues involved in water consumption, and write imaginative interdisciplinary lesson plans that will motivate students and teachers to further investigate water issues so that the next generation will be aware of and able to deal with issues of water scarcity.

Working with a team to produce a multimedia project was a rewarding experience. It was challenging in that I had to learn a lot about a topic I previously knew little about. In a short time I needed to be a subject matter expert so that I could teach others the value of water conservation and the dangers of water scarcity. I then had to synthesize the information sufficiently to produce lesson plans that would give the learner an understanding of water problems. This artifact, the collection of five lesson plans, shows my ability to rapidly learn and synthesize information, to sequence instruction, to apply constructivist principles to online learning, and to develop motivational, goal based scenarios.

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