"Build Your Own Seismograph" Lab

Here we see results from a "build your own seismograph" lab in a science course for students in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. The course fulfills the Boston College science Core requirement, and is designed to engage pre-service teachers in the doing of science and to improve their understanding science content. To introduce the students to the AS1 seismograph used for classroom recording of earthquakes from around the world, the students were asked to design and build their own seismograph based on first principles. After a short lecture on the history of seismographs and how they work, the students were given various items that might be useful for making an instrument that could measure vibrations, such as: springs, rubber bands, clay, marbles, washers, paper plates and cups, pencils, pieces of wood, and tape. The assignment was to use any combination of the available items to build an instrument that measues motion. After an hour of designing and constructing their own seismograph, the students were asked to describe their seismograph and how it measures motion. The pictures show examples of the students' seismographs from this exercise.

The course dedscribed here is team taught by professors Alan Kafka (geophysics) and Mike Barnett (science education), and the pictures are from a lab that was team taught by graduate students Eugene Szymanski (geophysics) and Anne Pfitzner (science education).

Contributed by Alan Kafka, Boston College