The Gulf Oil Spill Provides Many Learning Opportunities
You can use math and engineering lesson plans to delve into the affects of the recent oil spill.
By Debra Karr
From April to July of this year millions of barrels of oil leaked into the ocean due to the historic BP oil catastrophe. To put it lightly, that is quite a bit of oil. With this rate of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, and the difficulty of containment efforts, imagine how much oil is contaminating the ocean waters. There are many ways that students can learn from this tragedy. For example, students can calculate the amount of oil spilled on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis using multiplication. Also they can see the devastating impact that the spill has caused, and talk about the reason why it is so important for oceanic engineers to construct equipment designed to stop the wreckage of the spill.
The spill allows students a way to learn about engineering techniques as well. A relief drill, which is required to penetrate more than 13,000 feet of rock, was one of the techniques engineers used with the intention of filling the oil leak with drilling mud and cement. Earlier efforts to stem the flow included using an oil cap, but tropical storm Bonnie, halted all man-made relief efforts, and clean-up crews were ordered to evacuate and cease relief efforts to avoid the potential dangers of the storm, leaving the fate of the clean up in Mother Nature’s hands.
As oil continues to contaminate the ocean, you can have students utilize multiplication, division and percentages to calculate how much stock BP lost on a daily basis, as the oil continued to flow. There are also other math problems that can come from the “bright side” of the oil spill. Some businesses, like one kitty litter scooper supply company, and a Port-O-Potty rental company, are seeing a 1000% (that’s right….1000%) increase in sales. These “Spillionaire” businesses create math problems involving percentages, division, multiplication and fractions. Have students try to calculate how many sales make up a 1000% increase in sales.
Gulf Oil Spill Lesson Plans:
In this lesson students calculate percentages in discounts and sales. Using worksheets that are given in the lesson, students cross multiply and work with percentages. This lesson gives you a lot of freedom to come up with your own word problems, so you can have students figure out how many sales make up a 1000% increase in sales, like some of the “spillionaire” companies have experienced. This lesson meets all of the math standards for this grade level.
Newsworthy Event-The Oil Spill
Students design their own story and newspaper in this lesson. Although the lesson focuses on researching the life of Hemingway, I think using the oil spill as a relevant topic could be substituted. Students are assigned the roles of photography editor, research editor, publisher, managing editor, and, lawyer/editor, and then from there, they research, write, and design a page layout and current event story. Language arts, math, and social studies standards are intertwined within this lesson, and it can be fine tuned to meet the customized needs of the class.
This is a great lesson that teaches the principals of engineering. Students are presented with an engineering challenge, and they are required to design a solution to this challenge. The oil spill is an environmental challenge that can be used in this lesson. Both math and science standards are utilized in this lesson, and the scientific terms provide vocabulary that can address language arts standards too.
