Earthquake Resistant Structures

This article provided a fair amount of time setting up how to have the students create a model of a building and testing it for its durability in an earthquake. Sixth graders tended to like... See More

This article provided a fair amount of time setting up how to have the students create a model of a building and testing it for its durability in an earthquake. Sixth graders tended to like this activity better than the seventh or eighth graders, most likely because of the experiences I had given them that were similar to this activity. The greatest revelation to the students was the fact the structure with the rolling foundation support proved to be the most resistant. In fact, they thought they had done something wrong initially, so they retested it several times to validate what they saw was indeed true. I would have liked to have seen some actual photos of completed student designs both before and after they were tested.