Education

The goal of the workshop was to develop knowledge of earthquakes, introduce planetary science concepts and the use of ‘marsquakes’ as a tool for teaching. The last M6 earthquake in the local area occurred in 1946. Such large magnitude events are predicted to occur +/- 20-year cycles. Hence it is a strong political goal of the Valais area to stimulate earthquake awareness, preparedness; before, during and after an earthquake amongst students, teachers and the general public.

The OFXB Astronomical Observatory and Saint-Luc Planetarium were used as the setting for these workshops as it is Switzerland’s only observatory that is dedicated to education for the public and schools. The altitude of its location increases the chances of clear skies, and hence it is an excellent location for planetary observation and study.

WP 3 aimed to widen the scope of past seismology@school initiatives to support newer educational programs in Greece. The aim has been achieved by sharing experiences, resources and best practice via workshops with teachers and school-age students. Citizen science initiative reaching more than 300 primary and secondary students and the wider community. Following SERA teachers’ workshops and open days in Patras, Greece, results show improvements in:

• Felt earthquake responses via LastQuake (EMSC)
• Engagement and promotion ba the media (use of LastQuake, earthquake awareness actions)

The workshop for ‘InSight@School’ took place from 16 to 17 January 2019 at the International Campus of Valbonne Sophia Antipolis in Nice, France. On the occasion of the successful landing of the InSight space mission on Mars, a seminar for teachers was organised in France. This seminar was also the opportunity to organise a meeting of the SERA committee. The seminar consisted of a series of lectures on the space mission, its initial results, a series of practical activities and a poster session presented by the teachers.

In the framework of SERA, the Instituto Dom Luiz (Portugal) organized in collaboration with Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal) and the external partners of the WP1 “Seismology @ School” an event that took place from 2 to 4 July 2018. It focused on demonstrating how seismology and seismic engineering can provide tools and examples for educational activities. 

The workshop for educational and citizen seismology took place from 15 to 16 February 2018 at the Geological Society of London, UK. The meeting was designed as a forum for experts in educational and citizen seismology to get together and discuss areas of mutual interest and discover potential synergies and future collaborations. The meeting was scheduled with a balance between keynote talks and discussion or demonstration sessions. The format was to have some keynote addresses from the most experienced experts in developing equipment and running the school and citizen seismology programmes to facilitate future collaboration and encourage the growing number of institutions around the globe interested in developing such programmes. There were breakout discussion groups on motivating leaders and maintaining engagement, hardware and software development, data sharing standards and archiving.

The meeting was the first international meeting of its kind and was welcomed as school, and citizen seismology was an important fast-moving subject being developed with limited resources in most cases. All of the presentations at the meeting were filmed and are available to view here.

For three days in the beginning of November, more than 200 teachers mainly from Romania but also from Moldavia and Ukraine gathered for the first SERA teachers' workshop in Bucharest.