Outreach Activities

UT Girls Day (February, 2020)

Girl Day at UT Austin, including Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day and the Girl Day STEM Festival, was held on Saturday, February 22, 2020 on the UT Austin campus. Over 8,000 elementary and middle school students participated with over 1,500 volunteers from over 160 student organizations, research groups, community organizations and companies. Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day (Girl Day) is an international event celebrated during Engineers Week each year. Students and their parents or educators were invited to UT for an afternoon of hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fun.

20 Annual Austin Earth Science Week Career Day (October, 2019)

It was a great day with almost 350 middle-school students. As a part of this big event, the mentors introduced the kids to earthquake engineering with shake table and soil liquefaction demonstrations. The kids also visited the NHERI@UTexas facility which houses large, one-of-a-kind shaker trucks. The mentors introduced them how the VibroSeis trucks are used to study the seismic performance of soils, foundations, and structures world-wide

UT Explore (March 2019)

Explore UT is an open house organized by the university and is a major university-wide outreach event attracting the general public, especially primary, middle, and high school students. The Chapter attempted to introduce the concepts of seismic design to the students through the construction of buildings using spaghettis (for members) and marshmallows (for joints). The buildings were then testing on a drill-operated shake table. The Chapter also displayed a set of posters describing earthquakes, earthquake safety, geotechnical seismic hazards, historical earthquake damage, and how earthquakes affect buildings.

Shake Table Competition for St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Students (March, 2019)

EERI officers organized a shake table competition for approximately 25 students from St. Stephen’s Episcopal School. The format of the competition was similar to EERI’s annual Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition (SDC). Students teamed up to create structures, which were tested on a shake table at UT Austin’s Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory (FSEL). This program is led by Dr. Patricia Clayton, and the facilitator for this program was Farid Khosravikia. Immediately after the competition, students were given a presentation by the SDC team members pertaining to opportunities to get involved in student groups as an undergraduate student. Additionally, Dr. Patricia Clayton presented on earthquake engineering and structural engineering research. The presentation was followed by a tour of current FSEL projects, the NHERI@UTexas equipment facility, and a demonstration using a shaker truck.

UT Explore (March 2018)

Explore UT is an open house organized by the university and is a major university-wide outreach event attracting the general public, especially primary, middle, and high school students. The Chapter attempted to introduce the concepts of seismic design to the students through the construction of buildings using spaghettis (for members) and marshmallows (for joints). The buildings were then testing on a drill-operated shake table. The Chapter also displayed a set of posters describing earthquakes, earthquake safety, geotechnical seismic hazards, historical earthquake damage, and how earthquakes affect buildings.

18 Annual Austin Earth Science Week Career Day (October, 2017)

It was a great day with almost 350 middle-school students. As a part of this big event, the mentors introduced the kids to earthquake engineering with shake table and soil liquefaction demonstrations. The kids also visited the NHERI@UTexas facility which houses large, one-of-a-kind shaker trucks. The mentors introduced them how the VibroSeis trucks are used to study the seismic performance of soils, foundations, and structures world-wide.

Shake Table Competition for St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Students (March, 2017)

Many high-school students built different types of buildings with different structural systems for a shake table competition. This program is led by Dr. Clayton, and the facilitators for this program were Dr. Clayton, Farid, and Ghassam. They managed the whole event and evaluated the performance of the constructed buildings. The facilitators also introduced the students to natural hazards engineering.