To focus their research, students are presented with the following hypothetical situation:
Suppose you and your classmates are members of an organization that is looking for a site to build a new headquarters. As the Society for Earthquake Enthusiasts (SEE), you plan to put your headquarters at the site of a historically significant earthquake. You are not looking to put yourselves at risk, however, and are therefore looking for a safe location. You have decided that a safe site is one that will not produce a deadly earthquake in your lifetime (i.e., in the next 80 years).

Students complete a series of assignments throughout the semester to demonstrate their understanding of structural geology by writing papers and giving an oral presentation. First, a letter proposing a site is due early in the semester, next a historical background paper is due mid-semester, and finally a persuasive report and oral presentation are due at the end of the semester.
Has minimal/no quantitative component

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Students work in a jigsaw format, they start in an expert group analyzing one particular aspect of the earthquake that occurred (e.g., tsunami, geologic maps, damage assessment). After analyzing the data/information provided, students get into their new groups, which are a "consulting team" to make recommendations to key governmental officials about the earthquake they studied and implications for future development. These are presented in a poster session style event, which then leads to individual papers that are written about the same topic, which are peer reviewed and revised. Students are asked to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses in the process and to consider changes for future opportunities, as well as connect the curriculum to the overall process of science.

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Students will write a research paper comparing the Sumatran (2004) and Tohoku (2011) tsunami generating earthquakes.

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This demonstration uses an "earthquake machine" constructed from bricks, sand paper, and a winch, to simulate the buildup of elastic strain energy prior to a seismic event and the release of that energy during an earthquake.

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This hands-on demonstration illustrates how GPS instruments can be used in earthquake early warning systems to alert people of impending shaking. The same principles can be applied to other types of early warning systems (such as tsunami) or to early warning systems using a different type of geophysical sensor (such as a seismometer instead of a GPS).This demo is essentially a game that works best with a large audience (ideally over 30 people) in an auditorium. A few people are selected to be either surgeons, GPS stations, or a warning siren, with everyone else forming an earthquake "wave."

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Students in groups of two are giving access to 3 component seismograms from four locations through Google Earth. They are then asked to pick the P-wave and S-wave arrivals using OneNote and convert the time lag into a distance to epicenter. A circle drawing application in Google Earth then allows them to plot possible locations for the earthquake epicenter. This activity gives students practice in interpreting data, analyzing uncertainty and error in data or data analysis, and peer teaching Uses online and/or real-time data

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Ground shaking is the primary cause of earthquake damage to man-made structures. This exercise combines three related activities on the topic of shaking-induced ground instability: a ground shaking amplification demonstration, a seismic landslides demonstration, and a liquefaction experiment. The amplitude of ground shaking is affected by the type of near-surface rocks and soil. Earthquake ground shaking can cause even gently sloping areas to slide when those same areas would be stable under normal conditions. Liquefaction is a phenomenon where water-saturated sand and silt take on the characteristics of a dense liquid during the intense ground shaking of an earthquake and deform. Includes Alaska and San Francisco examples.

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In this activity, students explore of the concept of probability and the distribution of earthquake sizes, and then work to understand how earthquake hazards are described by probabilities. Students then work in small groups to collect and analyze data from a simple physical earthquake model and use online data to investigate and compare the earthquake hazards in California and Missouri. The activity concludes with a reflection where they students are asked to consider how, in the role of a city planner or emergency manager, they would use what they have learned to mitigate the earthquake hazard in California and Missouri.

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Introductory lesson that compares ShakeMaps between earthquakes in the same location but different magnitudes, and earthquakes of the same magnitude but different depths, to acquaint learners to the fundamental controls on intensity of shaking felt during an event: magnitude and distance from the earthquake source.

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Students will make "earthquakes" using a simple model, the earthquake machine. It is patterned on the EQ machine described by Ross Stein, Michelle Hall-Wallace, and others. References are given below. We have added force and distance sensors to the machine, and linked them (via GOLINKS) to new new software, that allows students to graph and analyze their data. All SW will be freely available. Students will evaluate the hypothesis that although earthquake patterns can be observed, the exact time and size of an earthquake cannot be predicted. Students then apply these insights to predicting earthquakes on the San Andreas fault, and estimating the magnitude of earthquakes on ancient faults in the region.

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Earthquake location is an interesting and significant aspect of seismology. Locating earthquakes is necessary for compiling useful seismicity information, calculating magnitudes, and study of fault zones, Earth structure and the earthquake process. Methods of earthquake location involve understanding of seismic waves, wave propagation, interpretation of seismograms, Earth velocity structure, triangulation, and the concepts (and mathematics) of inverse problems. Because earthquake location can be approached with relatively simple to very complex methods, it can be included in various levels of educational curricula and for "in-depth" study. Progressively developing a deep understanding of concepts, computational techniques and applications (and the capabilities, limitations and uncertainties of these applications) is a characteristic of science and an -- opportunity to "learn science by doing science." A number of methods that vary from simple to complex are available for learning about earthquake location. The methods also allow connections to other important concepts in seismology and provide a variety of approaches that address different learning styles and can be used for reinforcement and assessment.
Uses online and/or real-time data
Has minimal/no quantitative component

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In this activity, learners work collaboratively in small groups to explore the earthquake cycle by using a physical model. Attention is captured through several short video clips illustrating the
awe-inspiring power of ground shaking resulting from earthquakes. To make students' prior knowledge explicit and activate their thinking about the topic of earthquakes, each student writes their definition of an earthquake on a sticky note. Next, through a collaborative process, small groups of students combine their individual definitions to create a consensus definition for an earthquake.

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Students are expected to complete readings related to the mechanics of earthquakes (most don't do it). This activity allows them to apply the rules and extend their knowledge by making predictions.

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Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students build spreadsheets to tabulate and graph seismic wave amplitude and energy release to explore the logarithmic scale of earthquake magnitude.

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In this activity, students work with data from an earthquake in South America. Student materials include a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with marked cells and cells to enter data, a PDF with seismograms, travel-time curve and nomogram, and the instruction sheet. The exercise is divided into three parts.
Part I introduces the concept of a seismogram. Students identify P- and S-wave arrival times and use the differences to obtain distances from a travel-time curve.
In Part II, students work with GPS Visualizer to triangulate the epicenter online and with a nomogram to determine the local magnitude of the earthquake as recorded by each seismometer.
Part III involves an introduction to spreadsheets using a workbook with prepared worksheets. Finally, students rewrite algebraic expressions in computer terms for entering formulas in spreadsheets.

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This student homework and problem set has students quantitatively earthquake hazard, shaking and damage.

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After having learned about earthquakes in class, through readings and earlier lab assignments, students (in groups of two) are asked to design and construct (using balsa wood, string, paper and glue) a three-story building designed to minimize the effects of shear-wave vibrations that occur during an earthquake. The students are required to research the design concepts on their own and most of the construction work occurs outside of the regular laboratory period. The structures are tested for strength a week before the earthquake occurs - can they support the required load for each floor? On earthquake day, the buildings a tested for a "design earthquake" and then each group is given the opportunity to see how "large" and earthquake their structure can withstand - both in terms of frequency and amplitude variations. In addition to building the structure, each team has to submit a paper reflecting on why they designed and built the structure the way they did.

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For this exercise we meet in a computer lab and students access the IRIS Earthquake Browser to download geospatial information of earthquakes. Students use the GEON Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) to explore the location of earthquake zones and their 3-dimensional characteristics. Students compare the earthquake characteristics of subduction zones, mid-oceanic ridges, and transform faults. This leads into a discussion of plate tectonics.

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This activity will help students to identify and analyze factors contributing to Earth's climate systems.

Provenance: Beverly Owens, Cleveland Early College High School
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The Earth's Interior worksheet involves the layers of the Earth and is meant to help students: 1) Draw the layers of the Earth true-to-scale (on an image with a scale bar), and 2) Grasp the size of the Earth by starting at a somewhat familiar scale (the upper 40km of the crust) and progressively adding layers and increasing the scale to the radius of the Earth (~6,400km). Moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar has been shown to be an effective strategy to understand large magnitudes (Resnick, Shipley, Newcombe, Massey, & Wills, 2012).

Starting at the surface, the student adds layers of the earth as the scale increases (40km, 400km, 700km, 3,000km, and 6,400km). The layers include the base of continental crust, upper mantle, transition zone, lower mantle, and the outer core, as well as drawing the height of a building at the surface to help gain perspective as the scale changes. Students also complete 3 multiple choice questions at the end of the worksheet to solidify and focus on goals and important concepts.

This worksheet uses the sketch-understanding program with built-in tutor: CogSketch. Therefore, students, instructors, and/or institution computer labs need to download the program from the CogSketch website: http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/software/cogsketch/. At any point during the worksheet, students can click the FEEDBACK button and their sketch is compared to the solution sketch. The built-in tutor identifies any discrepancies and reports pre-written feedback to help the student correct their sketch until they are done with the activity. Once worksheets are emailed to the instructor, worksheets can be batch graded and easily evaluated. This program allows instructors to assign sketching activities that require very little time commitment. Instead, the built-in tutor provides feedback whenever the student requests, without the presence of the instructor. More information on using the program and the activity is in the Instructor's Notes.

We have developed approximately two dozen introductory geoscience worksheets using this program. Each worksheet has a background image and instructions for a sketching task. You can find additional worksheets by searching for "CogSketch" using the search box at the top of this page. We expect to have uploaded all of them by the end of the summer of 2016.

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