Making International “Seismic” Waves!

Our European project "Shaking Education" is certainly being noticed with our partner school in Germany, the Sickingen-Gymnasium in Landstuhl, having not one but two articles published in the regional press! Loosely translated the project title “Shaking Edcation”, could read “shaking the classroom”, which, however, should be rated positively in relation to the “earthquake” learning objective. This is our first project that is being delivered in a bilingual manner – teaching through the medium of geology and computer science together with another school in Iceland.

Participation is voluntary and has been undertaken with year 8 students. The first step in the “Earthquake and Plate Tectonics” project included introducing the participants, according to their own wishes, by letter, email or video. “The students work very independently and have their project partners in England and Iceland. They communicate with each other via e-mail and video conference and are currently designing their own logos on the subject of plate tectonics in the second step of the project, ” states our German colleague Alexander Bertsch.

Student Amelie Walter from Ramstein is happy to be there. "I'm looking forward to making new friends, having fun with the project and learning something," she says with a laugh. Julian Heinz from Bruchmühlbach sees a great opportunity to use the English language in this interesting subject and to make international friendships.

In the third component of the project, the participants will present the various phenomena of plate tectonics in international teams. Finally, the students transfer their knowledge of plate tectonics to their own country. The participants of the Sickingen-Gymnasium would have the Rheingraben and the nearby Eifel as ideal research objects right on their “doorstep”. In the UK, we shall look at why we do not get so affected by earthquakes. Moreover, we are working with our colleagues to develop their use of “Citizen Science”, teaching our students about the use of seismometers and teaching them to program simple seismographs using the Scratch and Python programming languages. They will then help their peers develop their understanding. “It is this use of ‘Applied Programming’ that appeals to the students”, says project founder and co-ordinator Gordon Neighbour, “computing is still often seen as a male dominated preserve and I am keen that our students have the opportunity to see how with simple tools, we can develop something that can make a real difference.”

It was not been an easy task developing the project through the double effects of Brexit and COVID-19, but through our use of the Erasmus+ platform we have been able to develop a partnership which will allow us to share our work with students from across the globe. Our other partner school is in Hveragerdi, 40 kilometers from Reykjavik, Olafur Josefson, Hallur Hróarsson and Anna Dora Agustsdottir are our partners at the community school, who use English as the connecting language for their lessons. We have maintained our contact despite the difficulties this year and our project continues to go from strength to strength.