Mathsational

I borrowed this lesson from John Stevens .  As a quick side note, this is what I love about the MTBoS community on Twitter.  You build a network of creative educators from literally all over the world and your own lessons improve because of the sharing that happens. Now, my students and I live in central Pennsylvania.  We have the occasional earthquakes, but they are they type that only the most observant people even notice.   Here is a link to our most recent earthquake. This is  John's original lesson.  On his page, you will find links to his Slides presentation, lesson plan, and student handout as well as notes about how he implemented the lesson. I started with showing a San Andreas movie trailer. I asked if anyone had seen the movie.  I asked is any of them felt the earthquake that we had the previous summer.  These questions lead to some lively conversation. I showed them some maps from the USGS website that show intensity in ...

I was inspired by  @samjshah  to create an activity using logarithms and earthquakes for my algebra 2 classes.  Sam wrote about Earthquakes, Richter Scale, and Logarithms here . I did a little googling and ended up with this activity.  I still had some questions, so I emailed USGS and got a quick and through reply.  The reply resulted in this activity.  I have not tried it with students yet, but I'm really excited to do so next year.  Please feel free to check it out and give me feedback before I try it in the classroom. Here is the student document if you'd like to use it. Enjoy.