A new paper by me and education expert Bridget Mulvey grapples with the question: analogue sandbox models are cool, but are they effective teaching tools? Analogue models are a way of demonstrating tectonic deformation processes in the classroom: the weirdness of physical scaling laws means that slowly squeezing and stretching a tub of sand produces faults and folds like those produced in the crust over geological timescales. After building a sandbox model for some research, I wanted to use it in my classes, but the results…Continue Reading “New Paper: an innovative cycle-based learning approach to teaching with analog sandbox models”
For the first time in a while, I attended the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, to reveal the results of my first foray into education research: The motivation for this study was simple. I had used my sandbox model in my Tectonics and Orogeny class before, and although the students had clearly enjoyed running experiments on it, I wasn’t sure how much they had really learned from it about geological structures and how they develop. There had to be a better way, and…Continue Reading “AGU 2019 Poster: do analogue sandbox models help students to visualise geologic structures and deformation?”