IAVCEI General Assembly, Santiago, Cile, 2-8 ottobre 2005
Tony Monfret, Jean-Luc Berenguer, Aldo Zollo, A. Bobbio, Jean Virieux
Since 1994, promoting education in physics through Earth Sciences and more specifically through Seismology has been an activity of different groups in Europe combining teachers, researchers and pupils. The education of young generations scientifically and socially to environmental hazards is a critical and important issue. In a prototypical ten years experience of teaching and learning sciences in European High Schools, seismology has been found to be a very adequate vehicle for such illustration while handling specificities of education systems in each country. Competences and strong interactions of teachers and researchers have been required. Over these years of continuous activities, these people have found that the target is very ambitious and both high-technological efforts and very focused teaching procedures must be set on. Dedicated instruments have been developped in order to fit both the scientific quality we expect and the pedagogical features we need: they have been deployed in Europe through an experimental protocol. These data have been made available for education purposes. These data have been used as the backbone for interactions between students/pupils, teachers and researchers leading to the development of specific teaching and learning materials as software tools for data analysis, simple experimentations and so on. The framework for such European initiative has been provided by Italian and French national funds and put together under the banner of the so-called EDUSEIS project. This EDUcational SEISmological European network (http://www.eduseis.org/) has shown that indeed environmental education is possible with its typical feature of long-term efforts. Taking into account the number of schools in Europe with modern communication tools, one may foresee that a large number of multi-parametric data could be collected during the night in specific schools with a relatively small man-power and hardware ressources with a tremendous impact of monitoring environmental surroundings as temperature, pressure, location and ground motion. Based on the EDUSEIS experience, an operational team composed of teachers, researchers and engineers could deploy 1K prototype systems for continuous monitoring. The expected hugh flow of data could be carefully analyzed and processed in order to make it available for educational purposes and actions aiming atincreasing the public awareness about environmental issues. One may hope this should be coordinates at an international level because we are all concerned by the future of our Earth planet.