Abstract

The following homework assignments are designed to 1) Help students discover their own environmental impact and its costs and 2) to help students develop their basic mathematics fluency by providing a number of personally relevant and important problems. The individual assignments build understanding of personal water use, sewage, waste generation and disposal, pollution sources and impacts, and energy use and costs.

Introduction

These modules are designed to be part of a 10 week course in local environmental issues for non-science majors in an introductory level course. They are used throughout the course as individual homework assignments. Ideally, the results would be pulled together into a single portfolio or paper that would attempt to integrate this information, although the assignments are mostly stand-alone. Some do rely on other information from other assignments. Each assignment is a set of questions that requires the student to find out about their personal environmental impact.