MERL Breaks Down Science Behind Iron Walls

Several former Lewis & Clark students played prominent roles in a recently released interactive software program that teaches chemistry while telling a story of environmental technology development.

The new CD-ROM, entitled MERL: Metals for Environmental Remediation and Learning, tells about the accidental discovery of iron walls. Iron walls are permeable underground barriers composed of sand-sized grains of scrap metal that degrade certain groundwater contaminants as they pass through. Since its August 2002 release, the free software has been widely distributed to teachers at the high school and college levels as well as to environmental consultants.

Barbara Balko, associate professor of chemistry, teamed with an Oregon Institute of Technology researcher to lead the faculty-student team that developed MERL. Balko’s interest in iron walls began when she investigated the role of semiconductors in iron-wall technology during a 1996-97 sabbatical at OGI School of Science and Engineering. There, she joined the research efforts of environmental scientist Paul Tratnyek, who was deciphering how iron works to remediate groundwater pollutants on a molecular level.

The two researchers thought the discovery and technology of iron walls would be a compelling educational tool because it represented a contemporary and environmentally relevant application of key chemistry principles. Balko says a CD-ROM was the optimal tool to communicate a nonsequential process, cover a variety of topics, and allow users to select the pace and depth of their study.

To finance the CD-ROM’s development and production, Balko and Tratnyek secured a grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in April 1998 and recruited students to help with narration, software development, graphic design, and beta testing. The resulting CD-ROM explains the chemistry behind the iron-wall technology in an engaging and intuitive format. It’s essentially an interactive multimedia textbook broken down into four chapters, each of which includes narration, animation, photos, videos, and other features such as mathematical simulations. Programmer David Severson ’99 and graphic artist Theron Morgan-Brown ’00 were involved from the project’s inception. Severson, a double major in computer science & mathematics and chemistry, had assisted Balko on iron-wall research prior to working on the program’s functionality and its extensive reference library. "The exciting thing for me was incorporating the research and basic concepts into a CD-ROM that is accessible and useful to students, teachers, and consultants," says Severson. He recalls early project meetings during which the foursome sketched out the CD-ROM’s architecture on a conference-room white board. "All of us worked together as a team," he says.

Today Severson uses some of the same principles he learned on the project to develop control software for wastewater treatment facilities throughout the Pacific Northwest. Morgan-Brown, a biology and art major who created graphics and animations and helped design the software’s user interface, says he recently put his MERL skills to work while designing a Web page for a butterfly farming group he started in Tanzania.

The project later benefited from work by additional Lewis & Clark students including Jonathan Edwards ’00, who lent additional graphics support; Allison Clark ’02, who performed beta testing; and Martin Wilson ’00, a former disc jockey for KLC campus radio who narrated the program.

The work of these students now reaches an expanding audience. Balko fields phone and e-mail requests for the CD-ROM, distributes copies at academic conferences, and has been approached by publishers interested in including the CD-ROM in chemistry textbooks.

"When students are shown that the principles have been applied to groundwater cleanup," Balko says, "chemistry becomes more exciting."

—by Dan Sadowsky