STIIX Water Filter Project: Building for Clean, Accessible Water
In the STIIX Water Filter Project, learners in STIIX-Ville take on the role of environmental engineers tasked with improving access to clean, safe water. The city’s water supply has become contaminated, and students must design, build, and test filtration systems that remove impurities while modeling real-world challenges.
Over approximately 2 hours of guided instruction, students navigate a full engineering design cycle using STIIX’s curriculum. They begin with five instructional videos—covering Introduction, Academic Concepts, How-To Build, Testing & Evaluation, and a Career Spotlight—that help ground their work in filtration science as well as systems thinking.
During the build phase, teams prototype filters using STIIX materials and everyday safe filter media (like sand, charcoal, or bio-based filtering layers). They test their designs by running water through their filters, measuring clarity, flow rate, and effectiveness, then analyze which designs perform best. Through iteration, students learn how variables like layer order, filter media size, and flow rate impact the purification process.
In the evaluation phase, students collect data and redesign their filters to improve performance—refining their models based on real results. They confront the trade-offs between speed and purity, cost and complexity, or materials and sustainability. This mirrors real-world engineering work in water infrastructure and environmental design.
Teachers are supported with full resources: slide decks, student worksheets, design logs, test-protocol guides, and reflection prompts—all aligned to NGSS engineering and environmental science standards.
Bring structure and excitement to hands-on learning with STIIX-Ville — your digital hub for project guides, assessments, and student progress tracking.
What’s Included in the Box:
- STIIX structural building sticks & connectors
- Filter-housing components (tubes or containers)
- Filter media (various materials to prototype with)
- Collection container for filtered water
- Build-log & design-iteration worksheets
- Testing guide (measurement of flow rate, clarity, impurity)
- Reflection & redesign prompts
- Teacher slide deck & detailed lesson plan
- Instructional video set (5 modules: Intro, Academic, How-To, Testing, Career)
