The European Geosciences Union (EGU) supports bringing science into the classroom at all learning levels, from schools to universities. Since the Higher Education Teaching grant programme launched in 2020, EGU has funded 24 projects to develop useful and freely available geoscience resources to university educators. This blog is part of a series of blogs highlighting the innovative and accessible resources developed by grant awardees to support teaching in higher education.
The purpose of this teaching resource is to assist geoscience students in enhancing their understanding of geological processes through interactive exercises and instructional materials, including films and guides related to sandbox modeling.
Target audience: undergraduate and graduate students.
This project produced 10 short (approx. 1,5 min) videos demonstrating different tectonic and geological settings through sandbox experiments. The sandbox experiments show, among others, the extensional geological setting with/without a rigid basement, the compressional forces exerted on basin inversion geological settings, structural deformation at the subduction zone (tilted and non-tilted), compressional deformation of the fold-thrust belt.
The preparation of these videos included robust research on the experiment parameters and materials to be used. Overall, the recorded videos and descriptions provided along with each of the videos are beneficial to all practitioner in geoscience field, particularly undergraduate students learning about structural geology, basin formation and geodynamic.
The videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrYBqyjZ3rbBs5zZmyllNKHR3np4KSYIN
Below each video, the link to the pdf description of the experiment is provided.
The material was produced by:
Siti Nur Fathiyah Jamaludin, Nur Adriana Wahid, Zuraini Ismail, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia, and was supported by EGU, through the 2023 Higher Education Teaching Grant programme (https://www.egu.eu/education/teg/hetg/2023/).
For more geoscience resources for higher education, please browse the teaching grant recipients for 2020, 2021, and 2023. More educational resources for teaching at university and other levels can be found on the EGU educational resources webpage.
If you’re interested in receiving funding to develop your own teaching resource, sign up to EGU’s monthly newsletter to keep updated when the next round of applications open and for other opportunities. For more information on the Higher Education Teaching Grant please contact the EGU Education Committee.
