UCSD - QUAKE OUTREACH 4 KIDS WITH A SHAKE TABLE

The Rotary Club of Torrey Pines-La Jolla partnered with other sponsors in a huge Educational project for elementary school kids put together by the SCSE chapter @ UCSD (Society of Civil & Structural Engineers). More pictures can be found HERE.

The full story is featured on the UCSD website.

" [...] Sixth-grade students from Carmel Del Mar Elementary School shrieked with unabashed amazement about 2 p.m. Tuesday at a UC San Diego earthquake-safety research complex eight miles east of campus. All but one of the seven-story buildings constructed by 20 teams of students in their classrooms toppled during Tuesday’s quake test, with K’NEX rods, connectors, and building parts scattered across the surface of UCSD’s largest shake table. The noisy learning experience was part of a unique earthquake-safety competition organized by Philip Yu, a graduate student in the Jacobs School of Engineering’s structural engineering department, and involved more than 1,100 fifth- and sixth-grade students from schools in Escondido and Del Mar. UCSD faculty also helped, as did scientists with the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that funded the construction of the shake facility at the Englekirk Structural Engineering Center.

Participating students were required to present carefully documented project descriptions at each day’s competition. Their buildings, about the size of bird cages, were judged on the basis of cost, with each plastic part carrying a price tag, with the maximum possible cost of a building set at $1.5 million. Aesthetics and how well the plastic creations withstood powerful jolts were also part of each team’s overall score.

The happy sixth-graders’ structure was a combination of engineering and art. They placed diagonal braces at strategic locations in the building and topped the structure with a serpentine arrangement of K’NEX connectors. The aesthetic flourish added additional cost to the building, but the students thought it was well worth it in another way. “In ancient China, dragons gave you good luck,” said a smiling Phan after the Tuesday shake. All of the students involved in last week’s competition were born after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, whose ground motions were duplicated during the school competition. Northridge resulted in about 60 deaths, more than 7,000 injured, 20,000 homeless, and more than 40,000 buildings damaged in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, and San Bernardino Counties. The death toll and roughly $40 billion in property damage prompted the call for more scientific testing of buildings and other structures.

After the tests, many of the students talked about the human toll as if their plastic models had been real buildings. That’s just the kind of relevance that the participating schools had hoped to achieve.
“Hopefully, these will be future engineers and, obviously, future home buyers, or builders themselves,” said Dugger, the science teacher. “Now they understand what goes into providing an opportunity to design a plan that would be selected to be purchased and built."