Educational Program: Grades Nine - Twelve

ACTIVITY-BASED PROGRAMS – These programs incorporate classroom-based simulations and activities that reinforce educational topics. Staff will guide students to experience scientific concepts in an exciting and easy-to-understand way.

Salt Marsh Estuaries In Your Backyard
Students will enjoy this lesson about a vital ecosystem that we have all along the northeast coast: salt marsh estuaries. After discussing the value these habitats provide, students will carry out the creation of a food web model and learn about the vital role the department plays in maintaining these important ecosystems.

Soil: The Wealth Beneath Your Feet
This guided inquiry lab allows students to practice analyzing soil characteristics and relating these characteristics to soil texture. There is a particular focus on field verification techniques and lab analysis of soil textures. Differentiated investigation focuses on application of these tools in the workforce.

Best Management Practice Challenge
Students look at the importance of the department’s stormwater regulations and different stormwater control methods that reduce impacts to our rivers, streams and lakes. After learning how stormwater runoff is generated and mitigated, students will work through various scenarios, testing their hypothesis for the best combination of stormwater controls.

Land Use In Your Watershed
Using an EnviroScape model to provide observation and simulation, discussions focus on the interactions of precipitation with various land use practices and the impacts they have on streams, lakes, wetlands and groundwater. Students work through various scenarios and pollution controls, testing their solution’s hypothesis by demonstrating them on the model.

Cookie Mining
Carry out a mining operation simulation from beginning to end! Wastes generated by mining operations need proper treatment and disposal, and Florida’s environmental laws help prevent contamination by these activities. As students work through the process of reclamation once a mining operation closes, they will discover the importance of these environmental regulations.

EXPLORATION PROGRAMS – These programs are fully immersive experiences where department staff conduct various activity-based programs in the field. Trips are designed to help teachers meet their Sunshine State Standards while giving students a dynamic, interactive experience.

Forest Explorers
Located at Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve

This program relates the concepts of soil science to the upland forest and freshwater marsh habitats that are abundant throughout Northeast Florida. Students will explore a maritime hammock, investigate soil profiles in the field and investigate the natural resources in this ecosystem.

PRESENTATION-BASED PROGRAMS – Department staff can provide topic-based presentations to larger audiences. The About DEP Regulatory presentation takes a deep dive into DEP’s regulatory programs, which safeguard natural resources by overseeing permitting and compliance  activities that protect air and water quality and by managing waste cleanups. This program is great for a Career Day or STEM Science Night, and leaves time for a Q&A session at the end.

If you are interested in requesting DEP staff to provide a program please click here.