Highway Seismograph

This is an activity that models the operation of a seismograph, a tool used to measure the size of earthquakes. While driving down the highway as a passenger in a car, learners slowly draw a line across a sheet of paper to record the up-and-down motion of the car as it goes over bumps both big and small. The resulting picture is a seismogram-like recording. Learners can take the activity further by measuring the "Pothole Scale" - a logarithmic scale that models the more well-known Richter scale.