My class of fifth-graders explored this lesson as it related to Landforms and flooding. We studied the floods in our local area, especially the Boulder Flood of 2013 which devastated our school.
Our experience with this lesson became: "How could you have engineered a house on this property so that it wouldn't have been impacted by the flood?" We had student groups work together to make an "anti-flood" plan first and share it with me. All students were given the design challenge of utilizing the same amount of materials (sand, clay, balsa wood, popsicle sticks and Monopoly houses, and a cup that would cause a flood.) This was a great experience, especially with the design aspect of preventing erosion with re-routing of the water with architectural design materials.