A group of high school students were left shaking with excitement at the University of Canterbury today.
An inaugural holiday programme designed to give young innovators the chance to test their skills ran at the university’s structural engineering laboratory on Friday.
The project, dubbed QuakeCraft, gave young students an opportunity to design, create and build mini-house prototypes that will go up against an earthquake simulator.
Brandy Alger Outreach co-ordinator for Quake Centre says the programme was “pretty cool”.
“We offer a three-day program for them [the students] to build design and create their own sustainable houses to perform an earthquake and we test it on a shake tables.
“They 3D printed design, laser cutting wood, they test, they create, they design and then the final rest of the day they finish it, today they tested it on the shake tables using their final designs.”
Martin Luff of Wiki House, a modern open source building tool, was please young people were getting involved with the science.
“In the earthquake sequence in Christchurch none of the people were killed by the shaking per-say all but two were killed by failures in our building infrastructure,” he says.
“So for young people to try and understand those forces and how to mitigate against them and protect people and build more resilient structures is really, really important.”
The university is looking to expand the project in future, offering it to more high schoolers around the country.
Newshub.
