Extensively used at Michigan State University for undergraduate design in water resources engineering, engineering hydrology, and capstone hydrology design. Students work on half a dozen real sites across Michigan — designing stormwater systems with live hydraulics, 3D visualization, cost feedback, and green infrastructure evaluation.
Active Learning with StormNET
Four ways in: watch it, investigate it, design with it, and solve with it. The Design rung is live today; the rest arrive in upcoming releases.
Short, narrated simulations — the foundation rung.
Narrated StormNET runs of urban drainage, LID performance, and 1D unsteady hydraulics.
Open-ended cases where students investigate the way professionals do.
CSO diagnosis, flood-risk attribution, and green-vs-grey trade-offs on real urban districts. Each case is open-ended: students form a hypothesis, interrogate a real site with the model, and defend a conclusion from evidence — the way professionals actually work.
Game-based design competitions — already developed. Students compete inside StormNET, defending plans with simulated outcomes, not opinions.
A graded problem library that turns every concept into assessable practice.
Urban-drainage problems on real sites, browsable by topic and difficulty, ready to assign.
Real cities experience water as one coupled infrastructure — stormwater, sanitary, and supply are one system. Rainwater harvested from roofs couples drainage with water supply. Combined sewer overflows couple sanitary with stormwater. Green infrastructure couples hydrology with hydraulics with ecology. But most curricula teach these in silos, one course each, and students graduate having never designed them as the coupled system they actually are.
Give students a parcel, a design storm, and a performance target. They build the drainage system live in a 90-minute lab — sketch, simulate, adjust, resimulate. Real-time hydraulics means they discover why oversizing pipes is wasteful and why distributed storage matters. The feedback loop is tight enough that students iterate dozens of times in a single session.
Take an existing concrete channel on campus. Students redesign it as a living creek with wetland benches, meanders, and riparian planting. They demonstrate that the retrofit meets the same hydraulic performance and creates habitat and raises adjacent property values — a real argument for every mayor in the country.
Simulate a real urban district with stormwater, sanitary, and water supply all active and coupled. Introduce a stress — a 100-year storm, a sanitary blockage, a water main break, a CSO event. Students identify cascade failures: stormwater overwhelms the combined sewer, which forces sewage into the eco-creek, which contaminates the downstream pond. They redesign for resilience. Teaching coupled urban water systems this way — where failures propagate between subsystems the way they do in real cities — has previously been impossible in classroom settings.