This page provides information concerning the FAU Honors College National Science Foundation Award DUE-088221.
Project Summary: This project will form the foundation for the
science curriculum in the Honors College, a brand new liberal arts college being
built within the larger Florida Atlantic University system. Through the support
of this project, the College will develop a discovery-based approach to learning
by introducing year-long student projects in first and second year biology and
chemistry courses. It will promote interdisciplinarity by creating educational
links among the sciences and between mathematics and the sciences. It will bring
science and mathematics out of the classroom and into the community, using local
ponds, lakes, forests and greenways as science laboratories. And for both
faculty and students, it will integrate teaching, learning and research in a
holistic form of scholarship.
The common thread in discovery-based learning,
interdisciplinary links, and the community laboratory will be long-term
environmental research projects in which student and faculty teams study the
water quality in the dozens of area ponds, the diversity of wildlife in the more
than 250 acres of preserves, and the impact of a growing population on the
environment. Such an approach is possible because the College is located in the
midst of the planned -- but not yet completed -- community of Abacoa, a mixed
residential and urban center which is being built around the college campus. The
community projects will be supported in the laboratory by the request for two
important pieces of equipment, a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS),
which provides a powerful means for detecting and identifying chemical
compounds; and a geographic information system (GIS) lab, which provides a
variety of tools for spatial analysis and modeling of large heterogeneous data
sets. The GIS lab will also provide a computer classroom for team-teaching new,
interdisciplinary, linked courses.
Project Links
Science and mathematics courses involved in the project
Note: Projects for math/stats are currently being revised and some links may lead to files that are incomplete!
New 'link' courses
Links to mathematics resources
Links to other integrated programs
Datasets being used in our project