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NSF Awards $450,000 Grant to Develop
and Expand Brownfield Action Application
Feb. 20. 2007— Peter Bower, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science at Barnard College, and Frank Moretti, Executive Director of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University, have been awarded a grant of $450,000 from the National Science Foundation to support the development and expansion of their award-winning environmental simulation Brownfield Action.
Brownfield Action is a web-based, interactive, 3-D digital space and learning simulation in which students form environmental consulting "companies" and work collaboratively to investigate contaminated real estate. The program has been in use at Barnard College for six years and, in that time, has been established as a highly successful pedagogical model for teaching introductory environmental science. It is also currently in use at Lafayette College and Connecticut College. It replaces the traditionally fragmented, abstract, "cookbook/ recipe" approach to science labs with one that is holistic, realistic, inquiry-based, and interdisciplinary. In Brownfield Action, students conduct a Phase One Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) by reconstructing a detailed narrative of their site's contamination. How successfully and cost-effectively each student "company" achieves this is up to how they navigate the program's diverse forms of evidence, including socio-historical information, and a diverse set of measurement tools to probe the 3-D dataset comprised of over two million data points. While there is essentially only one "correct" answer or reality - that is, the location and source of the contamination - there are countless ways students can reach this conclusion, the variations wholly dependent upon how they gather, store and manipulate their data. Everything student companies choose to do costs money and they compete with other companies to find the hidden reality and maximize their profit. In this way, Brownfield Action provides valuable practice at tackling the complexity and ambiguity of a large-scale interdisciplinary science problem.
The new NSF grant will enable the software to be rewritten and reprogrammed to be fully-modularized. As such, instructors across the country will be able to incorporate Brownfield Action into their syllabi or select the portions of the program that best complement their curricula. The grant will also enhance server capabilities, which will allow the program to be accessed by more students and more instructors in an increasing number of educational settings including the corporate and government sectors.
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