Rowan University puts the engineering in aquarium

April 15, 2008

When looking at an aquarium, the first thing that comes to mind is probably not engineering. Dr. Kauser Jahan, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rowan University's College of Engineering, begs to differ.

"An aquarium is an exquisite combination of interacting systems that can be analyzed using multidisciplinary engineering and scientific principles," said Jahan. "The aquarium connects engineering with an interactive, innovative and exciting application that appeals to a wide audience."

Jahan is leading a project that will work hand in hand with Cumberland County College (CCC) and the New Jersey Academy of Aquatic Sciences (NJAAS) in an endeavor to educate the world's classrooms about the science behind a simple aquarium.

NJAAS, located in Camden, is a non-profit organization that seeks to cultivate an understanding and appreciation of marine organisms and ecosystems through research, education and youth development programs, according to the organization.

The academy offers an educational outreach program for K-12 students and teachers that will be part of this effort and will focus on engineering content. NJAAS will employ engineering concepts in the program's study of a 100-gallon aquarium it houses in its on-site Discovery classroom. Rowan faculty will work with NJAAS personnel to help properly prepare them to teach these concepts.

NJAAS will provide real-time data and visuals of the aquarium accessible through its website (www.njaas.org) under the title, "NJ-Quarium." This website will show a live web cam view of the aquarium, offer teachers of all grade levels access to recorded experiments NJAAS performs on the tank and provide real time data for classroom analysis. Teachers will have the ability to download data from this site and help students plot and conduct statistical analyses where applicable.

Experiments will teach students about the science and engineering elements involved in an aquarium. These topics include water quality testing, water treatment processes, oxygenation of water, evaporative losses in an aquarium and pollution issues.

The aquarium project initially will be implemented in a freshman engineering clinic course at Rowan to study reverse engineering, a process in which students disassemble products to assess how they were engineered.

Rowan will develop experiments, lectures and presentations that will be made available via the Internet. The NJAAS website also will include activities that are appropriate for adoption by K-12 educators and two-year colleges to use with the NJAAS aquarium.

NJAAS will host a field trip for the freshman engineering clinic students participating in the aquarium clinic. That trip will help students learn about the water treatment processes specific to the NJAAS aquarium.

CCC, a community college in Vineland, is home to a fish barn that produces 100,000 tilapia each year and serves as an aquaculture training facility for the students enrolled in the aquaculture certificate program. The aquarium team will tap into CCC resources to develop lessons for use with the aquarium.

Additionally, CCC will adopt experiments and modules developed for the Rowan freshman clinic and implement them in CCC's Introduction to Engineering course in an effort to make the transition easier for students entering the engineering program at Rowan from the county college.

"My goal is to have the engineering students adapt their experiments so they are able to be used on various educational levels," Jahan said. At the end of the semester, Jahan hopes to have the best clinic team take a trip to NJAAS and perform an experiment using the Discovery classroom. The entire experiment could then be viewed on the website by classrooms across the world.

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