Activity (Hands-On)Grades 6 - 8
Shake It Up! Engineering for Seismic Waves
Materials List
Each group needs:
- 1 shoebox
- 1 wooden board (sized to fit in the bottom of the shoebox with room to move in all directions)
- 10 marbles
- 20 Popsicle sticks
- 10 rubber bands
- string, ~50 cm to 1m in length
- hot glue gun and 3 glue sticks
- 1 sandwich bag of mini marshmallows
- toothpicks, a handful or unlimited, depending on materials limitations imposed by teacher
- Shake It Up! Activity Worksheet (PDF), one per person
To share with the entire class:
- duct tape
- masking tape
- scissors and/or box cutters
- stopwatch
Final model building designs being tested on a drill-powered shaker table.Copyright 2010 Carleigh Samson, ITL Program, University of Colorado Boulder
To build the teacher's shake table (optional):
- Build a drill-powered shake table shake table; follow instructions at https://discovere.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DB_Exhibit_Shake-Table-DCE_022117.pdf
- Alternatively, if you do not want to build the drill-powered shake table, you can construct a simpler one following instructions at https://pbskids.org/designsquad/build/seismic-shake-up/. Or, have the class select the best shake table from all the groups and use that one for the one-minute earthquake challenge testing.
- Alternatively, the engineering colleges at some universities make available their shake tables for use by outside student groups for academic purposes.