Designing Solutions for an Oil Spill In this activity, you will examine solutions that will help reduce the effects of oil spills on aquatic ecosystems. You will
evaluate three solutions to clean up an oil spill and suggest ways to improve the solutions.
Estimated time to complete: 1 hour
Use the information in this scenario to answer the questions that follow:
Natalia's teacher challenges her students to design a way to clean up oil spills. She gives the students a bowl of
water with a small amount of oil on top. She tells them to use the bowl as a model to figure out a way to remove
oil from ocean water while limiting the negative effects on the ocean's ecosystem. Each group is to come up with
three possible solutions and then test the solutions. They'll use the results from the tests to design a device to
remove the oil from the ocean.
Part A
The first step to engineering is to define the problem. Write down the problem the students have to solve, and
describe the challenges they will face when coming up with a solution.