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WITHDRAWN The “Earthquake Suitcase” – A Research-Inspired Educational Tool for Earthquake Vulnerable Communities

Description: 

WITHDRAWN The “Earthquake Suitcase” is a travelling laboratory, designed and developed to inform, educate and familiarize the public in earthquake prone areas with earthquakes and their impacts, aiming in reaching people at remote locations, unable to visit a natural history museum. It includes presentation and videos on the earthquake basics (why, how and where large earthquakes occur, their effects on people, objects and buildings/infrastructure), reading material, hands-on exercises and instructions to build a family emergency plan, the contents of an earthquake emergency bag, interactive educational toys, leaflets and a model small-scale shake table. This is a stable platform, upon which a moving platform is fixed. The upper platform converts the initial manually controlled rotary motion to axial motion, thus simulating ground shaking. It is equipped with two model buildings of different vulnerability and an accelerometer recording the simulated motion. It may produce various levels of shaking, thus simulating higher and lower ground accelerations of various frequencies. The supplied software/mobile app provides various signal analysis options of the simulated “event”. Persons with knowledge of Physics may perform spectral analysis of the simulated event and compare the response of model buildings to the different levels of shaking. The suitcase is presented in the Europe-wide public event “Researchers' Night” and in Greek classrooms, evaluated by schoolchildren and their educators, as an example for disaster preparedness. It was also used in the partnership project “Supporting Social and Emotional Learning” between Greek and US Fulbright alumni to develop resources that bring a strong awareness of mental health needs to practices in educational settings and refugee camps, where the earthquake phenomenon was used as an analogy of mass trauma-producing disaster, aiming at simulating the circumstances, due to which adolescents are likely to be traumatized. The suitcase and the earthquake lesson were presented in US classrooms, thus embedding social and emotional learning into science content.

Session: Research Advances in “High-Impact”, “Under-Studied” Earthquakes and Their Impacts on Communities [Poster Session]

Type: Poster

Date: 5/3/2024

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Vasiliki

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors