Peace Corps

• Subject(s): Language Arts & Literature, Environment & Health, Science
• Grade Level(s): 6–8, 9–12

Overview

As a Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to the village of Wanzuzu, students playing the Peace Corps Challenge game are faced with many challenges they must solve using realistic solutions. In this challenge, students are asked by the Mayor to help figure out why the water in the village is contaminated. This contamination has caused many in the village to become seriously ill. Students will find Dika who will help them solve this challenge and try to restore the village to good health.

Background Information

Factoids from the game:

More than a billion people in the world - more than one-sixth of the world's population - use unsafe water sources because they have no alternatives. Source: UNICEF

In developing countries, about 90 percent of sewage and 70 percent of industrial wastes is discharged untreated into other water. This often pollutes the water people use for drinking, cleaning, and irrigating. Source: United Nations

Procedures

Explore the Water Contamination WebQuest

Play the Water Contamination Challenge (Flash)

Additional Resources

Coverdell World Wise Schools

• Video: Fighting Malaria One Net at a Time
• Lesson plan: Working with Environmental Issues (Grades 3-8)
  Students will learn to appreciate the importance of clean water for the maintenance of good health, and how the lack of clean water leads to the spread of disease and parasites in West Africa.
• Lesson plan: Waterborne Illnesses (Grades 6-12)
  At the end of a one-week lesson, students will be able to identify common waterborne illnesses, and their symptoms, prevention, and treatment. Understand how cultural traditions can make prevention of illness difficult.

Other Sources:

• World Health Organization: Water Sanitation and Health
• EPA Teaching Resources: Water
• Environmental Literacy Council: Water
• World Water Day
• National Academy of Sciences: Safe Drinking Water

Framework and Standards

Enduring Understandings

• Culture often determines how communities view and solve community challenges.
• We all have basic needs such as access to clean water to maintain our health.

Essential Questions

• What impact does lack of access to clean water have on a community?
• How do cultural viewpoints influence a community's decision making in regards to environmental challenges?

Standards

Social Studies:

Thematic Strand I: Culture

• How culture influences the ways in which human groups solve problems of daily living
• How people from different cultures develop different ways of interpreting experience
• Language, behaviors and beliefs can both contribute and pose barriers to cross-cultural understanding

Thematic Strand III: People, Places, and Environments

• Human modifications of the environment

Thematic Strand IX: Global Connections

• The causes and consequences of various types of global connections
• The actions of people, communities, and nations have both short and long term effects

Thematic Strand X: Civic Ideals and Practices

• Perspectives of various stakeholders in proposing possible solutions to issues

Geography:

Essential Element II: Places and Regions

• Physical and human characteristics of places

Essential Element V: Environment and Society

• Changes in meanings, use, distribution, and importance of resources

Science:

Content Standard F: Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

• Personal health
• Science and technology in local challenges
• Personal and community health
• Natural and human-induced hazards
• Science and technology in local, national, and global challenges
• Natural resources
• Environmental quality