Summer SAVY, Session 3 Day 2, “Finding “Faults” in Media: The Geology of Disaster Movies” (7th-8th)
Hello SAVY Parents! Today’s theme was natural disasters, and we covered a lot of aspects of them! We started out with the students learning about earthquake magnitude and intensity, hazard (likelihood of an event occurring) vs risk (likelihood of that event impacting a particular location), and recurrence intervals of different natural disasters. After that, we did an exercise using seismic data to locate a historic Earthquake. The students were able to incorporate their new knowledge of seismic waves from yesterday!
We had two movies today–the first was San Andreas starring Paul Giammati as an earthquake scientist who finds a way to predict earthquakes before they happen. He can apply this new technique immediately as earthquakes occur along the San Andreas and chaos ensues. (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson also stars in the movie, but we focused less on him since he doesn’t talk about science as much.) The students thought about why people move to and settle in places with high risk for disaster (such as California), and what we can do to reduce risk in places with high hazard.
The second movie we watched was Dante’s Peak, and our conversation was formatted a bit differently. We watched the first 25 minutes of the film, during which we see that things are signaling that a volcanic eruption may be imminent in the volcano (Dante’s Peak). The clip that we watched ends at a city council meeting where they are discussing the pros and cons of alerting the citizens of the town of Dante’s Peak of a potential eruption. The main con of putting the town on alert is that they fear a new multimillion-dollar investor will pull out if the town is seen as dangerous. We created a grid of potential outcomes and thought about the pros and cons for each (see photo below).
In the afternoon, we read an excerpt from a PhD dissertation about the impact that watching disaster movies has on the public’s perception of those disasters. The students broke into two groups, and each group created a visual representation of the things that their group discussed. I am attaching pictures of both posters. They might be a little confusing out of context, but you can ask your student for more information about their poster if you would like, and hopefully, you will enjoy seeing some of their work!
Lastly, we finished working on our daily final project. The final project involves the development of a film concept that centers on a scientific occurrence, and the creation of character descriptions, storyboards, and science summaries (among other things). The students were put into their final project groups and started brainstorming what they might want their movies to be about in advance of tomorrow, when we will work on researching some of the science itself.
Here are some potential continued discussion topics that your child might have new thoughts on and that you might have thoughts on as well!
- How do we know when we should evacuate from a disaster? Do you know in advance in every case? Who is making those decisions?
- What disasters occur in Nashville (or where you live)?
- Do disaster movies make you more scared of those disasters?
- This could also give a good opportunity to go over (or create) an emergency plan for your household, which was reflected in our film review.
Tomorrow’s theme is Earth History and the evolution of life, and I’m excited to keep moving through our content!
Best,
Dr. Rodgers
