Material and Energy Flow in Engineered and Natural Systems: Textbook Proposal for a Focused Introductory Environmental Science Course Incorporating Laboratory & Computer Mode

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Public policy issues involving aspects of environmental science are characterized by their complexity and by the changing nature of the day's critical problem. Traditional environmental science textbooks that catalog current issues are useful in making students literate about today's problems but do little to prepare students to solve or think critically about tomorrow's undiscovered problems. We are developing and teaching a course structured to teach students how to conceptualize and tackle scientific problems in the environment. We wish to turn our work into a textbook that includes suggested laboratory/field projects designed to introduce students to experimental approaches and their constraints as well as suggested modeling problems using the user friendly modeling software Stella. We already have a conceptual core for our project, several successful laboratory/field exercises that incorporate sequential development of skills and sophistication, and a number of problems and cases. The aim of this project is to develop additional field/laboratory exercises; collect more current environmental data to support problems, laboratory modules and student inquiry; develop new problems; write additional computer models; write our ideas in chapter form; discuss our work with others and discuss the work of others with them; and develop and implement methods for judging our work's effectiveness