5th Grade Historians Shake Things Up with Seismograph Designs

“Making history” has a whole new meaning for fifth grade historians who recently collaborated in small groups to take on an interesting engineering challenge. They learned about ancient Chinese civilization and several inventions from that era, and they brainstormed, designed and built their very own seismograph based on the ancient Chinese version. Teachers collaborated across disciplines to support the students and enable a healthy, but shaky, competition for the culmination of the project.

Middle School History Teacher Robyn Williams shared, “Students used their knowledge of earthquakes from science class and ancient Chinese seismographs from history class to create their own device that can detect the vibration of an earthquake, and perhaps even the direction of the quake. The goal of the project was to get students to think about these ancient Chinese inventions in a new way. Why and how do these inventions come about? How do they help people?”

Students took to the Maker Space to bring their designs to fruition, and one team, with the help of Coordinator of Instructional Technology Patrick Woessner, even employed the 3D printer. Lilah Pronger ’27 shared, “We used a 3D printer to print the ramp parts of the seismograph, and we were the only team to do that.” Some students took a novel approach by adding a bell to the device to audibly signal an earthquake’s occurrence.

With slightly anxious expressions and more than a few fingers crossed, the students tested out their devices in front of their classmates in a competitive Flex period this week. Students placed their seismograph onto a shake table and watched with anticipation as the marble rolled – or didn’t roll – according to the quake and the direction of its source.

Fifth grade teachers evaluated and judged the seismograph inventions based on their design, performance and consistency. The winners from each history section had their picture taken with their device, and the printed photo was placed on the History Wall of Fame bulletin board hanging in Williams’ classroom.

Congrats to the following winning teams for shaking things up with ancient history!

A Block – Millie Holekamp, Isla Hamilton, Chian-Chian Tsai, Lilah Pronger
B Block (two winners) – Alexander Goossens, Charlie Krieger, Conor Doherty; and Nick Weaver, Joshua Lam, Julian Fundler
C Block – Qadir Thompson, Heru Bey, Navneet Raghuram, Amey Parwal
D Block – Isha Ahuja, Eleonora Slabun, Saige Rainwater, Maahi Saini