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Taking incentive from their participation for the European Parliament of Science, a group of students from the "European Pathways of Knowledge of Sciences" Group of the General Lyceum of the Evangelical School of Smyrna in Athens decided to deal with the study of the natural phenomenon of earthquakes.
Ms Panagiota Argyri with the students of that compose the two teams that studied earthquakes
Their professor, Ms. Panagiota Argygi, through the collective exploration and the interdisciplinary approach of the subject, applied School Seismology practices and inspired two groups of students to participate in the “Create Your Own Seismograph“ (http://seismografos.ea.gr) contest, with impressive results.
Seismology allows teachers to introduce not only the fundamental concepts of earth science, physics, and mathematics but puts them in the context of real-world problems; it allows students to apply advanced technology for data collection, access, analysis, and visualization; and lends itself to critical thinking and problem solving.
Theoretical Preparation
Within the classroom, students took the role of researchers and reproduced simulations and experiments to understand the physical phenomenon: what is an earthquake, how it is generated, the seismic waves and related laws of Physics. Through simple structures they learned about seismicity:
This video shows their experiment on seismic waves:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HxC8CM61SXXT7gHp7VRc_k4ytGXdEs4x
At the same time, students also studied the importance of the existing network of school seismometers in Greece and realized the benefits of further networking and interconnection of the produced seismographic data.
Students also performed bibliographic and journalistic research, aiming to study existing and propose new decision-making policies on the very important issue of preventing and dealing with earthquakes and their consequences at national and pan-European level. Here is a video of the first gathering of the students’ team:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1plE2Swna7p9SDa_o1TzyiazDP5xtUhek/view
The project logo was created:
Technical Preparation (I)
It was decided that two hardware devices will be designed and produced:
The first one was based on Arduino, combined with an accelometer and attached to a laptop running a software, written on Python and converting the seismic waves to graphical representations.
The two young reasearched which designed the first seismometer
Here is a video of the two students that began working on the first technical solution:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rzDoViH2hv-s09wN-wQA22dkxxdDAOKd
Technical Preparation (II)
The second device was based on simpler materials and it is able to record on paper the movement of a pen set with elastic material in equilibrium inside a simple box of shoes!
This is the team of students which worked on it:
Here is a video of the two students that began working on the second technical solution:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1723DNDxT2whGkS42mOFDfiqKSbpgkLIT
The Arduino based solution
The students used an Adruino board:
in which they connected an accelometer:
In the following video they explain the development process of its hardware and software in the PYTHON programming language: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pqZi500TxhqgMfKvj1KbsAkgFS6J1OQe
The overall outcome is depicted in the following picture:
By creating an artificial movement on the table, the devices captures data which are visualised on its screen, as depicted below:
The "Shoe Box" solution
The other team only used a box of shoes, a pen, a paper and elastic material to retain the pen in a vertical position.
This is the outcome of their effort:
Here is a video of the students that began working on the second technical solution:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1W_zZWOF_MUT42XbrRGgcij0lOAl-AdnZ
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QaKhP8FKweI1n2ibqJEt0jtMJjmwMPhF/view
http://portal.opendiscoveryspace.eu/en/search-resources-in-community/849545
The project captivated students’ interest (for both teams) while performing actual research activities and increased their fascination of science and more specifically of seismology. It actually contributed to their preparation for the expertise, but also for the original thinking, creative work, responsibility and awareness about science that are required to act as citizen scientists in the future.
The project demonstrated that schools, equipped with low cost infrastructures, made by their own students (with the necessary scientific guidance and support), can “act locally but think globally”. Data gathered from the created seismometers can be interconnected with larger national or international databases and extend the existing school networks monitoring earthquakes.
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