LEGO City Earthquake

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Want to learn about earthquakes in a new and unique way? We created a LEGO city earthquake, and it was so fun! This is a cool STEM project when learning about city planning and engineering.

We live along one of the largest fault lines, so earthquakes are a very real threat to our area. I have never experienced one in real life, yet! But is is definitely a fear in the back of my mind. I thought learning about earthquakes with my kids would be a good thing, too.

We have a LEGO table that can be removed and flipped to be a regular table. We removed the top and built a giant Lego city on the whole table top. Our top has four large baseplates on it.  You could do this LEGO earthquake with any large LEGO baseplates that you have.

The kids built buildings of all shapes and sizes making it look like a mini city. They built some tall and some short; some wide and some skinny. They wanted to experiment and see which ones would withstand the earthquake the best. It’s a great way to get them thinking about real earthquakes and how the buildings would fare.

Once the city was done we spread a bunch of marbles on the floor and put the table top on top of them. We just rolled it back and forth quickly to make it like an earthquake. Of course, once was not enough, though!

We tested it a few different times and a few different ways.  The kids wondered whether height or width would withstand it better, so we tested both. They rebuilt the buildings a bunch of times and a bunch of different ways.

You can see a video of our LEGO City Earthquake here!