ROLL IN STONES How to get students excited about studying rocks

The main goal of this project is to increase students' interest in studying Geology and to show the relevance of geological systems in everyday life. Thus, its implementation is expected to contribute to arouse curiosity about the natural world and motivate for scientific learning, in a non-formal education environment that complements the formal classroom approach.

A ballasted railway is composed of the substructure and the superstructure, the latter consisting of elements such as rails, sleepers and fasteners and also ballast. The substructure has as its constituent elements the sub-ballast, the track bed and the foundation. Ballasted track is the construction process with which we associate the railway, i.e. rails laid on sleepers and coarse granular material. Ballasted track can be differentiated according to the type of track construction. The sleepers can be made of wood, concrete or even metal. Ballast is a granular material resulting from the crushing of highly resistant rock material. Its function is to support and distribute the loads coming from superior elements, to drain water, to absorb vibrations and to oppose transversal and longitudinal displacements of the track. The ballasts must present high resistance, particularly to impact and wear, and must have a high durability, these characteristics are found in igneous rocks such as the healthy granites, in which one of the main minerals is quartz, this mineral has a higher resistance to chemical and mechanical changes than the generality of the minerals found in rocks.

In this work, the students selected three stretches of the railway track of the city were selected based on a visual analysis of the rocky elements that composed these stretches: stretch 1 at the railway station, near the passenger boardings and alightings, on line 9; stretch 2-an area of the line only used for changing the direction of the compositions; stretch 3-an area north of line 9, used for the circulation of trains. The existing rocks in each section were collected and identified, the levels of contamination and deterioration of the materials were analysed and the results were discussed in the classroom.