We suggest introducing your student to EnviroLand in your normal laboratory write-ups and as a pre-lab exercise. In the teaching of environmental chemistry labs we have used a number of write-ups, including published procedures and our own versions, and no matter how clear the procedures are to the professor, some students always overlook the important steps. The intent of EnviroLand is to simulate the laboratory experiment prior to the laboratory period.

The use of EnviroLand as a pre-lab exercise allows the student to pull out the key steps in your written precedure, and compare those to their actual experience in the lab. Two laboratory experiments, the Thomas Slope Formula method for analyzing BOD data and the Potentiometric Methods, are admittedly less interactive. These are intended to show the student how to process a typical data set and obtain appropriate data plots.

The fate and transport models of EnviroLand are the most versatile. We feel that it is important to force the student to make manual calculation prior to using the simulations in EnviroLand. After the student is proficient in these calculatons, we use EnviroLand to study the effects of changing stream channel dimentions, water velocities, flow rates, mass loading, reaction rates, etc. on dispersion (shape of peak or width at half maximum concentration).

The students can see for themselves the effect of physical processes such as advection and dispersion, as well as chemical processes such as reaction rate, on the pollutant transport. This approach significantly increases the number of problems that can be worked in the classroom, but still allows the student to become proficient with manual calculations.