Internalizing the Symbolic World: Using Low-Cost Shake Tables to Convey Earthquake Engineering Concepts to Secondary School Students (K-12 Division: Curriculum Exchange)

摘要

In order to recruit more students into engineering majors and ultimately improve college level academic performance, students must be exposed to and excited about engineering from an early age. However, demonstrating challenging concepts that require complex mathematics, which most students have yet to be exposed to, is difficult. This task is exacerbated if students feel lost in the concepts and become disengaged. Several earthquake engineering modules capitalizing on the use of a low-cost, commercially available instructional shake table (developed by the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation; see Figure 1) have been developed to address these issues. In each module concepts are broken down to their fundamental levels and presented to students through a combination of lectures, videos, peer instruction, in-class demonstrations, and construction based projects to increase student comprehension. The modules goals are to build the students' knowledge base through interactive activities, generate excitement about engineering, and develop a physical intuition about engineering concepts.