Creating School Seismology Labs For the Development of Students’

Educational seismology projects all over the world allow schools to detect signals from large earthquakes happening anywhere in the world. It starts from the natural interest and fascination for the destructive power of earthquakes. Still, the experiment quickly became much more, from simple information to exposing fundamental concepts tested by practical experiments. In the framework of the Romanian Educational Seismic Network, classroom activities that enable students to learn about some basic science concepts using seismology and earthquakes as a unifying theme have been developed in the last decade. Students are guided to use concepts such as energy transfer, wave properties, and resonance to understand elementary models of earthquakes' causes and effects. From 2022, a new Erasmus Project adds one more piece to the framework, together with a truly regional approach - SEISMOLAB - Creating School Seismology Labs For the Development of Students’. One of the aims of the project is to bring together seismologists, pedagogues, curriculum developers, local authorities, advanced educational developers, and schools to join forces during the implementation and co-design, develop and validate an innovative professional development program for supporting the in-service training of teachers on topics related, but not limited to seismology education. Thus, apart from Seismology, participants will be familiarised with the open schooling approach that provides a powerful framework to engage, discuss and explore how schools can facilitate open, more effective, and efficient co-design, co-creation, and use of educational content tools and services for personalised science learning and teaching and citizens science.

In Romania, the project will be piloted in ten secondary and high schools where SEISMO-labs will be developed based on a framework for organising School Development Labs of Students’ Competences and a set of educational scenarios (SEISMO-Labs demonstrators). A SEISMO-Lab Toolkit and a teacher training program will prepare teachers to implement SEISMO-Labs in their schools, receiving training on the approach and the pedagogical methodologies. An evaluation methodology will be designed for mapping and monitoring the impact and effectiveness, both quantitatively and qualitatively, at the student, teacher, and school/institution level of the SEISMO-Labs.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was done in the framework of the project “Seismo-Lab” which has been funded with support from the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme (Grant agreement number 2021-1-EL01-KA220-SCH-000032578).