Wednesday, August 5, 2009

An instrument that records earthquakes

Shake shake shake went the mysterious object in our I.C.T teacher's hand. What was it?

Mrs Tele'a said that we were going to make a seismometer. A seismometer is an instrument that records an earthquake and its magnitude. We were doing this because we were going to have a video conference with Hamish Campbell about a region called Fioidland in the South Island of NZ, having a huge earthquake . No, not Hamish Carter, this guy is a....a....well .. he is really heaps of things. Yesterday we had to make a home made seismometer. We got these steps from the Internet. These were the materials we used.


-a cardboard box
-a polystyrene cup
-a permanent marker
-a piece of paper
-a string about 60 Cm's
-marbles or tiny rocks{optional}

When we started, the whole room was filled with noise and we were all racing against each other. After very hard work, we finally made our seismometer but this was still unstable. The pen that was stuck though the cup was not reaching the paper on the bottom of the cardboard box.
We tested it after we had fixed this problem. The marbles that we put in, were too heavy and it broke the string that was holding the cup off the ground. Our team was very happy to have finished it. Here is a picture of our home made seismometer.

1 comment:

Toreka said...

Hi Leoden!
That was a great post about the seismometer. Yes, there was a lot of noise indeed. In our group, we cut our string too long and then too short. It took a very long time to make the seismometer. But in the end we eventually finished and ended up with some funny looking earthquake papers.
Keep up the great work!

Toreka