The most developed platform curriculum in MAGNET. Designed for courses in hydrogeology, contaminant transport, aquifer mechanics, and environmental geoscience. Real sites, real physics, real regulatory relevance. Students investigate the way professionals do.
Active Learning with IGW-NET
Groundwater is the hardest water science to teach — the system is invisible. IGW-NET makes it visible, then puts students to work. Four ways in: watch it, investigate it, design with it, and solve with it.
Short, narrated simulations that turn the abstract equations of flow and transport into visible behavior — from the foundations to the research frontier.
The foundational physics, one idea at a time — flow, pumping, contamination, remediation, and surface-water exchange.
Open Concept Lessons →Research-grade heterogeneity, scale, and uncertainty — the stochastic hydrogeology behind the papers, run interactively.
Open Computational Discovery →Open-ended cases where students investigate the way professionals do — each case reframes the simulations as a problem to solve, not a topic to memorize.
Game-based design challenges. Each has a scenario, a budget, and a win condition — students compete inside IGW-NET, and the physics is learned through the game. Every brief is an adaptable template you can make your own.
Protect a drinking-water well with the fewest pumping wells at the lowest cost.
Open & adapt →Hit the regulatory target by the deadline at the lowest lifecycle cost.
Open & adapt →Reconstruct an aquifer's parameters from sparse data — reason from residuals to physics.
Open & adapt →Characterize a hidden plume under budget, then design cleanup from your own characterization.
Open & adapt →Turn public data into a calibrated model of a real aquifer near you.
Open & adapt →When watching, investigating, and designing need to become graded work, the problem database turns every concept into assessable practice.
Hundreds of database-driven problems built on real sites and data — browsable by topic and difficulty, ready to assign and auto-check.
The four rungs are what students do. Groundwater is the hardest water science to teach because students can't see the system; IGW-NET makes the subsurface visible and responsive, so it stops being a topic to memorize and becomes a system to investigate. Here's how you put that to work.
Pose a question, sketch the aquifer live, ask students to predict, then run the model — and let them see who was right and why intuition failed.
From a single live-thinking demo in an intro course to a semester-long capstone in advanced hydrogeology — adopt one rung or build the whole ladder.
Capture-zone designs, calibration reports, characterization-and-cleanup plans — professional artifacts, not problem-set answers.
Publish a seed problem; other instructors adopt and adapt it. The curriculum grows the way the platform does — built once, refined by all.