Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My 5th grade son wants to complete a science fair project about land slides. He wants to build a ramp add houses and and cars at different places and use different material on the ramp (soil, sand, mixture of soil and sand, with or without plants) and then add water and see what happens. This is the question he developed “Will different types of foundation on a hill result in more damage by landslides?” He is trying to figure out how you measure damage. Is his question a good question and how would you measure damage?

Thank you,
Hope Pressler

Hi Hope,

This sounds like a fun project! I think the key will be controlling so many variables so that you are only testing the foundation type. For example you'll need to keep the ramp shape, volume of water, volume of material/soil and placement of houses/cars the same and only vary the type of material/soil used.

I think you could measure damage in several ways and document with pictures. One of the most straightforward ways I can think of would be displacement. How far does the house or car move during the testing with all other variables held constant. This could be measured in inches.

Hope this helps and have fun!

Audrey

Hi Hope,

I will add that we have a similar project called "Can Plants Stop Soil Erosion?"

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... il-erosion

The measurement in that project is the mass of the soil that gets washed down the hill.

However, audreyln's suggestion might make more sense if you are trying to measure "damage" to the structures as opposed to the hillside itself.

Hope that helps!

Ben

Hi Hope,
I found a similar experiment but with earthquakes and different types of soil. Here is the link https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... arthquakes
I hope that helps with your experiment!

Best of luck,
Jenny