Case studies are used infrequently in engineering education, except perhaps as occasional anecdotes or “war stories” told by instructors. Yet there appears to be surging interest in case studies as a pedagogical tool to provide students with active and discovery-based learning experiences. Through case studies, students may actively acquire information, collaborate with others in problem definition, develop an investigation strategy, choose among alternative problem solving approaches, and negotiate or attempt to convince others of their conclusions. The surging interest is understandable when one contrasts these activities with the more traditional “lecture, learn, and test” classroom regimen. Business, law, and medical education have long traditions of using real or simulated case studies to teach students. The Harvard Business School is widely noted for pioneering the case method of instruction Christensen 1986 , and the college now develops approximately 350 cases each year for business courses worldwide. A typical business student may be exposed to as many as 500 cases in an MBA program Bhandari and Erickson 2005 . In the business field, cases are typically real and are presented as dilemmas or puzzles to be solved. Students are given narratives describing an individual, agency, or business with a problem, along with quantitative background information in the form of charts, graphs, and tables. The instructor acts mainly as a facilitator to help students understand the facts of the case, analyze the problem, and present possible solutions. There is seldom a single, “correct” solution; rather, emphasis is placed on the decisionmaking approach and on evaluating the pros and cons of a range of reasonable solutions. Now, engineering instructors may well argue that business is not at all like engineering practice, where analysis and design are founded upon scientific principles and a well-defined knowledge base. Following the business education model, how can an instructor emphasize the human condition and various subjective views in teaching students to calculate energy loss in a pipe? Certainly, lecture and traditional problem-solving exercises have their place in engineering curricula, but the potential benefits of case studies should not be so easily dismissed. For environmental engineering, they might be literally “poo poo-ed,” however! Case studies can stimulate interest in a subject, foster motivation to learn, and help students to understand the relevance of the subject in a larger societal and economic context. Furthermore, case studies can promote deeper learning and development of Bloom 1956 higher-order thinking skills: comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. If case studies are used in group work, as they frequently are, students receive the added benefits of collaborative learning. These skills seems critically important in a field such as water resources planning and management, in which professionals work in multidisciplinary teams