Delaware River Steamboat Floating Classroom

Overview

“SPLASH” the “smiling steamboat” will take you on a 2-hour voyage of fun and learning, featuring environment-based science, history, social studies and technology. See where Washington crossed the river to New Hope, where rafts ferried settlers, horses and wagons and where canal boats crossed attached to a cable. Here wildlife flourishes and now millions of people get drinking water. Every SPLASH trip will include a healthy dose of learning, touring, and a good time.

The Steamboat Floating Classroom provides an adventure in creative learning where students of all ages can study the science and history of the river and its impact on their health and environment. The overall goals are to strengthen academic skills and increase breadth of knowledge. You can design an entertaining field trip for your class, club or association. Action and engagement are the hallmarks of this trip. School classes usually divide into three groups, one on each deck, to do small-group activities in rotation. On-board activities emphasize participation (e.g. rain on the watershed model), experimentation (e.g. water chemistry), creativity (e.g. writing) and political skills (e.g. negotiation). Our teaching staff will assist group leaders to develop activities appropriate for any academic subject for use before, during and after the boat trip.

Pick one or a combination of topics

Science

Biology: Clean-water ecology (our most popular topic). Where does drinking water come from? Activity 1. Students participate in a watershed demonstration with the “Enviroscape” model and cause pollutants to get washed into the simulated river. Activity 2. At another station on the boat students engage in portraying the water cycles, clouds-to-river-to-clouds and river-to-faucet-to-river. Activity 3. Students view microscopic organisms and macro-invertebrates, or do bird spotting, and join in a food chain demonstration with discussion of clean vs. polluted water. Teachers should take the opportunity to participate in a Project WET training seminar on the boat, with continuing education credit (see Step 3: Planning a Trip).

Physics: States of matter. Students will experiment with water as gas, liquid, and solid, Activity 1. Students learn about the water cycle from steam clouds to rain, to snow and ice. They see it all on the steamboat. Activity 2. How much water is in the river? What are water’s characteristics in terms of mass, and potential energy? How can one measure river height, volume and flow rate? Students figure out how to read graphs of river depth and river current, and how hydrologists make predictions. The graphs can be found at the National Weather Service website. Activity 3. Students go to the engine room and work with the controls and learn the physics behind fuel and power issues, appropriate to their grade level. Physics is also featured in the lessons below about Electricity and Water Safety.

Electricity: The shocking story. Motors, generators, batteries, solar panels and inverters, the steamboat has them all. Activity 1. Students compare AC vs. DC and role-play the competition between Tesla for AC vs. Edison for DC. The boat has both. Activity 2. Students delve into electricity for communication with a historical review of the boat’s voice tube, bell system, horns and the invention of the intercom, radio, radar, sonar and TV. Activity 3. There is also an activity station by the boiler where they can explore the electric mechanisms for sensing the boiler water level, bilge water, the boiler flame and the state of the automatic fire extinguisher system. For students interested in weather, we turn to the mystery of lightening and the Tesla coil. Students can quiz our engineer who designs electrical systems for satellites.

Chemistry: Oil and water. Activity 1. Students test acidity and dissolved oxygen with LaMotte approved test kits, and measure pollutants and turbidity. Activity 2. Students investigate the characteristics of oil vs. water and how they are used on the steamboat for combustion, lubrication and steam power. Students compare home heating oil for the boiler, gasoline for the generator, and solar power for batteries and alternative fuels. Station 3 is all about photosynthesis, metabolism and the chemical reactions of living organisms. The overall theme is research into the mysteries of movement.

Brain awareness: Neuroscience and addiction is the topic of this three-part study of the brain. Activity 1. At the teacher’s discretion, students can see a real brain and a brain model to help learn its major parts and functions. Activity 2. We find out how the brain gets energy from the environment for itself and the body. This is the story of food intake and weight control. Activity 3. It becomes clear to the students that drug abuse can take over the brain systems that evolved to reward eating. Students quiz our neuroscience professor, who has them apply principles of biomedical research to find answers on the web.

Water Safety: Activity 1. We play life-jacket games designed by the Coast Guard Auxiliary to teach the importance of flotation devices and how to put them on. Activity 2. Will it float? Archimedes’ Principle. Fun with buoyancy in model airplanes, balloons and boats. Activity 3. Will it tip? Games with boats in water tubs to illustrate stability in canoes, rowboats, tour boats, and fishing boats. Students meet a helicopter pilot, hot air balloon pilot and boat pilot.

Technology: Boilers and bridges. Activity 1. In the engine room, students start and stop a real steam engine. They discuss the pistons, cams and levers. They use models to see “How things work.” Activity 2. At the boiler room, they learn the difference between fire-tube and water-tube boilers and figure out which kind we have. They turn the boiler on and off and explore the many safety devices, while learning the concept of safety in redundancy. Activity 3. On the bow deck, students study two bridges first-hand, and then with blocks they build a self-supporting arch. Older students snap together various types of model bridges and test their weight bearing characteristics. Activity 4. The upper deck is the perfect place to view the paddle wheel with its cranks and mechanical feedback mechanism. The students build cardboard, rubber-band driven model boats and race them to test design features. Students can quiz our professional mechanical engineer.

History

Crossroads of the Revolution. Activity 1. Students learn how, in 1776, Washington used the river to escape the British, and they see the place for themselves. Activity 2. Students help Washington plan a sneak attack on the British garrison in Trenton for his first successful battle. 3. At the third station students read aloud Washington’s letters of 1783, written at his house near Princeton when the war was won. They argue Washington’s idea of a federation instead of a confederation by role-playing as colony representatives debating the problem. Then they become representatives to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia where they witness the first steamboat and then return to work and take a vote for the first U.S. President. This unit can be scaled down and combined any other history topic below.

Social Studies

The river and canals in the Civil War. Activity 1. Students visit the D & R Canal, which is very near the steamboat dock, and see a canal aqueduct and the remnants of a canal lock. They draw a map of the canal system from Bethlehem PA to Easton, New Hope, across the river to Lambertville, and on to Trenton, Bordentown and New Brunswick. They learn how Abraham Lincoln depended on the canals along the Delaware River to win the Civil War. Activity 2. On the steamboat, each student gets cue cards to describe the life of some child of 1861: the child of a Lenape fisherman from Point Pleasant, a Dutch militiaman from Lambertville, a German blacksmith from New Hope, an African farmer from Quakertown, an Irish canal digger from Trenton, a French storekeeper from Frenchtown, an English cotton salesman from Atlanta, Georgia, and more. They note human rights and equal rights as practiced at that time (the northern canal and river boats were surprisingly egalitarian). Activity 3. What were the roles of men, women and children then compared to now? Students get a taste of sociology and demographics (e.g. What proportion of New Jersey residents, today, is foreign born? Answer: 1 in 5. Next question, what countries did they come from?)

Inventors: The industrial revolution comes to Trenton and Philadelphia, from Benjamin Franklin to John Roebling. Activity 1. When was the steam engine invented and how was it used? Students work with a model steam engine that generates electricity and a steam tractor that pulls Lincoln logs. Activity 2. Students debate the question, “Who invented the steamboat, John Fitch or Robert Fulton?” They discuss what it takes to be an inventor. Fitch made the first steamboat and ran it between Bordentown and Philadelphia, but Fulton was first to be financially successful. What constitutes an invention and a business success? What will the next transportation inventions be? Activity 3. Hands-on demonstrations include oars, sails, paddlewheels, propellers, water jets, and hovercraft. And, of course they interact with the steamboat itself, with its ingenious parts invented by the Englishman Thomas Savory and Scotsman James Watt and the African-American Elijah McCoy (the “real McCoy”) and John Fitch, the trapper- entrepreneur.

The science and history of transportation. This is a tour instead of a 1-2-3-lesson plan. Students see a canoe, rowboat, mule boat, outboard motor boat, sailboat, jet boat. steam train and diesel train, all within walking distance of the steamboat docks in Lambertville and New Hope. (They hear about the submarine in the D & R Canal a long time ago.) As we go along, we discuss power from muscle, river currents, dams, wind, coal, oil, gas, nuclear energy, and solar-powered sources. At the end of the tour, students debate the pros and cons of various energy sources for travel and the types of pollution caused by each.

River civics. Who protects our environment? Activity 1. Whose water is it? When and where does it belong to everybody or the local water company or the American Water Company or the German holding company? Who drinks it? Students learn how water is apportioned and distributed. Activity 2. Who protects our water? International law (UN), federal law (EPA), state law (DEP), municipal law (town rules) and home (your rules). We demonstrate how water is purified for drinking and discuss how sewage is treated before being put back in the river. (A guided tour of the Lambertville sewerage plant is an option). Activity 3. How ballot power works. Students discuss the means by which African, European, Asian, South American and Native American, men and women struggled for civil rights and political power along the river. We discuss how three states, NY, NJ, PA, cooperate to share water. Students take roles in a mediation exercise and go home with a list of mediation skills.

River Stories, poetry, art and song. You can arrange readings and reenactments, such as Mark Twain’s description of riverboat life or George Washington’s crossing from Lambertville to New Hope to escape the British Army. You can read it, write it, play it, draw it, or sing it on a real riverboat. Actors and storytellers are available for hire.

You design it

Tell us what you suggest. We can arrange pre-trip lesson plans and student teachers from local universities to teach almost anything from the environmental-based point of view. This is education based “where you live”, and a river runs through it!

Combined tours

Combined tour with other local attractions (morning-afternoon):

• Farms: Howell Living Farm or Holcombe-Jimison Farm
• Steam trains in New Hope or Ringoes-Flemington
• Mule boat and museum in New Hope
• Honey Hollow Environmental Education Center Peddler’s Village shopping and antiques in Lahaska
• Dining, arts and crafts in New Hope or Lambertville
• Walking tour of historic Lambertville or New Hope
• Michener Art Museum in New Hope