Environmental Modeling—A Project Driven,Team Approach to Theory and Application

Environmental modeling is an important tool for understanding and managing complex environmental systems. Regardless of discipline, complete modeling includes a number of steps, ranging from conceptualization to application. However, modeling courses often focus on just one, or at most a few, of the steps and frequently are assignment‐driven. Moreover, they often present numerical procedures as recipes, without regard to theory or limitations and without regard to “real‐world” application. In this course, we unify the modeling sequence by exposing students to the full spectrum of modeling (mathematics, physics, and numerical methods) in the context of surfactant‐enhanced remediation of contaminated soils, a technology being developed at the University of Oklahoma. An innovative course structure is used that couples team learning with a project‐driven syllabus (also referred to as just‐in‐time learning) and combines mathematical and physical modeling via data from laboratory and field testing. Other thematic areas can easily be developed in the same framework. We believe the course pedagogy is highly portable and can serve as an example for any modeling course or for many other courses in an engineering curriculum.