Earthquake+Activities

**Earthquakes**

 * Essential Question (s):** How can we use accelerometers as a representation to measure the g force in the ground shaking motion produced by an earthquake? What does the g force of notable earthquakes look like?

This station uses the iPad's accelerometer to measure "student made earthquakes". This cutting edge technology is used in today's modern mobile technologies, iPads, smart phones, iPod touches, and so on. Who knows, you might have an accelerometer on you right now... :) Because this technology is embedded in common mobile technologies, teachers may already have the mobile technologies to run some of these experiments in their own classroom.

Notable Earthquakes California || km || 11 || 2007 Chuetsu ||
 * PGA single direction (max recorded) || Mag. || Depth || Fatalities || Earthquake ||
 * 2.7 g || 9.0 || 32km || >10035 || 2011 Tohoku ||
 * 2.2 g || 6.3 || 5 km || 172 || 2011 Christchurch ||
 * 1.7 g || 6.7 || 19 km || 57 || 1994
 * 1.26 g || 7.1 || 10 km || 0 || 2010 Canterbury ||
 * 1.01 g || 6.6 || 10
 * 1.01 g || 7.3 || 8 km || 2,415 || 1999 Jiji ||
 * 0.8 g || 6.8 || 16 km || 6,434 || 1995 Kobe ||
 * 0.78 g || 8.8 || 35 km || 521 || 2010 Chile ||
 * 0.6 g || 6.0 || 10 km || 143 || 1999 Athens ||

[|Popular Science-cool!]

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Students can engineer different structures using a variety of materials and bonding techniques. They can then test out the ability of their structures to withstand the different types of earthquakes. Here is our document for the STEM in the Box activities for grades K-3... Here is our document for the STEM in the Box activities for grades 4-8...

The most appropriate variables for testing depend on the age of the students, and includes:
 * Types of Earthquakes
 * g force
 * time
 * structure building material
 * structure engineering

Here is the earthquake glossary from U.S. Geological Survey..[]

[|Video- Earthquakes 101-National Geographic] [|LiveScience website for earthquake activity]

Japan, 2011..[|video] Start this one at about 3min to 8min...[|documentary]

Cool website for middle school. Includes podcasts and catchy science songs.... [] Lesson.. http://k20alt.ou.edu/groups/all-shook-up/ and http://k20alt.ou.edu/groups/whats-shakin/

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[|Google Earth/KML Files]

Science apps blog on Sparkvue... []