Students Design Solutions to Protect Watershed

Students design solutions for the Escondido community to protect an ecosystem in the Escondido Creek Watershed

Through our partnership with Escondido School District, Nature Collective offers culturally responsive, hands-on learning that connects youth to nature. Students explore interactions between living and nonliving things, identify issues in the Escondido Creek Watershed, and use design thinking to develop solutions. Design thinking involves understanding users, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and creating innovative solutions through prototyping and testing.

This year, the problems the students identified included green waste, trash and litter, fertilizers and pesticides, carbon dioxide in the air, and manure and pet feces. Solutions included building trash-cleaning robots with compartments to store and then throw away the trash, creating educational booklets about pesticides for distribution, creating an aquatic shield that can help with oil spills, and an air extractor to clean industrial pollutants.

 Above: Mega Bot 300, trash cleaning robot

Above: Aquatic shield to help avoid oil spills

 Above: Air extractor that cleans industrial pollutants

Students presented their problems and solutions in English and Spanish to a panel of teachers, principals, school administrators, and Nature Collective staff. Presentations were scored using a rubric that rated non-verbal and oral fluency skills and content.

We thank the Escondido School District for their continued partnership, support of our experiential learning units and field trips, and inviting us to participate in the dual language conservation project presentation. 

Thank you to the California Coastal Commission’s WHALE TAIL®  program for supporting our Ecosystems in Action program. 

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