Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
demand increases each year. This group also participates in exhibitions and outreach
projects organized by several public and private institutions.
In the last few years, the attention of scientifi c word to outreach in geophysics has
grown, as demonstrated by many international projects and other activities performed
by research institutes (Burrato et al., 2003; Hamburger et al., 2001; Johnson, 1999;
Tertulliani and Donati, 2000; Virieux, 2000) and by the special sessions held at the in-
ternational conferences as AGU meetings, EGU General Assembly, and ESC General
Assembly (DiDa Working Group, 2002; Nostro et al., 2004; Tertulliani et al., 2004).
Moreover, in 2003 Genoa has been the capital of the scientifi c outreach with the fi rst
edition of Science Festival (“Festival della Scienza”) in Italy. The Festival lasted for
10 days and included more than 180 events, such as scientifi c and technological ex-
hibits, educational activities, lectures, and videos. The large success of the initiative
includes the Festival in the European Scientifi c Week, a European Union network of
the VI Framework Program (http://www.festival.infm.it/it/home.php).
In this chapter, we describe the educational project developed by the E&O group
for the 2003 Genoa Science Festival: a portable museum designed to bring on the
road educational activities focused on seismology, seismic hazard, and Earth Sciences.
The exhibits include activities that allow visitors to play back famous historical earth-
quakes, understand where and why earthquakes happen, discover the relationships
between earthquake locations and plate boundaries, produce their own earthquakes,
and track recent earthquake activity.
Figure 1.
(a) the 3-D magnetic Plate Tectonic Puzzle; (b) children reconstructing the magnetic puzzle
to learn the subdivision in plates of the Earth's lithosphere.
THE EXHIBIT ELEMENTS
The visitors follow a guided tour that starts with a short movie showing the location
of the largest Italian earthquakes during the last 1,000 years, conceived to illustrate
the most seismic prone areas in Italy. In the first section, PC programs and posters
introduce the visitors to the Plate Tectonics theory. Here an interactive program work-
ing on three desktop PCs illustrates where and when earthquakes and volcanic erup-
tions occurred from 1960 to the present. In the next exhibit the visitors can put down
and reconstruct a 3-D magnetic plate tectonic puzzle. This exercise helps to better
understand the Earth's surface configuration and constrains the concept of the Earth's
