How to use an educational sand-box model to enhance the knowledge groundwater dynamics

Forty-five adults, which do professionally not deal with geology or groundwaters, filled a voluntary questionnaire\udon groundwater dynamics in Slovenia. The survey pointed out that about a fifth to a quarter of them has a weak\udknowledge on this topic. Groundwater occurrence, production and pollution are quite well known, excluding a\udwidely spread opinion on subsurface water veins and underground rivers and lakes (which are true only for karstic\udaquifers), but groundwater protection is much less known. It has turned out that the answers often base on the\udexperience of the interviewee rather than on an understanding of a regional groundwater dynamics. Therefore, we\udbelieve that it is worth to start a systematic education on groundwaters not only for geologists but also for general\udpublic. The VO-KA company from Ljubljana has given an incentive for development of an educational sand-box\udmodel of the Ljubljansko polje aquifer, which will be used to spread knowledge on ground- and drinking water.\udThe model of an inhomogeneous and anisotropic intergranular aquifer has predominately a two-dimensional water\udflow. It enables visualisation of natural features and anthropogenic on the quantity and quality state of the stored\udgroundwater. It can be used to explain hydrogeological phenomena on various levels of knowledge, from simple\udvisualisation to more complicated mathematical descriptions