Surviving Storm Surge

Fun!

This was an educational and entertaining program! The explanations provided in the PDF were extraordinarily helpful in explaining flooding to our participants (middle school kids).
We had a variety of material on hand (craft sticks, pipercleaners, cotton balls, tinfoil) for kids to use to build flood barriers to protect their houses. Each design was unique, and many were successful. That being said, at the end of the event, the kids all wanted to complete flood their house, regardless of their flood barriers.
We also combined this activity with the Waterproof the Roof activity, so after seeing if the flood barrier withheld water, they then tested to see if their roof could repel rain.
At the end of the program, several kids asked when we would do this project again, which is a sure sign of success!

Great for a Large Age Range

I used this activity with kids in grades K through 6 and it worked surprisingly well for such a large age range. The parents were on hand to help.

We used a slightly larger bin than recommended, and we placed the bin in an empty wading pool to help protect the carpeting. We used a 2-gallon pitcher to hold the water for dumping and we were able to reuse the same water over and over by emptying the bin back into the pitcher from the safety of the wading pool. The water got a little gross from the playdough, which was dyed green, but that made the destruction more fun.

I made a double batch of homemade playdough for the land. The students were supplied with a copy of the page “Building a Flood Safe Home” from the PDF, a copy of the beach house template printed on cardstock, craft sticks, toothpicks, glue, masking tape, Scotch tape, duct tape, scissors, and markers. The only cost was the ingredients for the playdough (around $5.00); everything else was found around the library.

The “Earthquake Engineering” video listed on the back page of the activity PDF is a great resource to use as an introduction. We also did the activity Edible Destruction at this event, and the video gave some good background information for both design projects.

We had one child who was very excited to create the storm surge and test his house, so he spent minimal time designing. This actually worked out well for the other students because when we dumped the water on the unsupported house, they all ran back and changed their original designs, adding legs to secure the house into the playdough and reinforcing the walls with duct tape. It was a great opportunity to explain they weren’t cheating – they were learning the design process!

One problem we found at the beginning, was the playdough sort of floated around the bin the first few times we dumped the water to create the storm surge. After two or three dumps, the playdough was wet enough to stick securely to the bottom of the plastic bin. Go ahead and get the playdough wet before you start testing the houses to avoid your island floating away.