nerc.ac.uk

Football quakes as a tool for student engagement

Denton, Paul; Fishwick, Stewart; Lane, Victoria; Daly, Debra. 2018 Football quakes as a tool for student engagement. Seismological Research letters, 89 (5). 1902-1907. 10.1785/0220180078

Before downloading, please read NORA policies.
[thumbnail of Eduquakes article_draft.pdf]
Preview
Text
Eduquakes article_draft.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (633kB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

In 2016 students from the Geology department at Leicester University used simple low frequency geophones and low cost seismic dataloggers set up in a primary school and local museum within Leicester city to record crowd induced vibrations from the King Power Stadium, home of Leicester City Football Club, a professional soccer team in the English Premier League. Clear signals were detected every time the home team scored a goal, which the students named “vardyquakes” on social media after the team’s star striker. After a student-led social media campaign the story was picked up by the press and turned into a viral news story, leading to hundreds of newspaper articles in papers around the world together with dozens of TV news stories and interviews with the students. However the true success of this project was in finding an engaging and reliable tool for encouraging university students to participate in outreach activities with local schools. The football-quakes provided a regular, and predictable seismic signal which was easy to understand and gave the opportunity to explain to school students how seismic waves are created and can travel through the ground.

Item Type: Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1785/0220180078
Additional Keywords: education citizen science outreach
NORA Subject Terms: Earth Sciences
Education
Related URLs:
Date made live: 10 Aug 2018 10:51 +0 (UTC)
URI: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/520107

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Document Downloads

Downloads for past 30 days

Downloads per month over past year

More statistics for this item...