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The NARL's National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) has been organizing annual programs of the Introducing and Demonstrating Earthquake Engineering Research in Schools (IDEERS) for thousands of students from across the globe for the past ten years. IDEERS entails a competition geared at promoting earthquake engineering and seismic protection education. The competition challenges students to design and make small-scale models of buildings that can stand up to strong earthquakes. In addition, the program introduces and demonstrates analytical and experimental simulations of earthquake engineering to the students.

In collaboration with the NARL’s Science and Technology Centre for Disaster Reduction, and the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Earthquake Engineering Research, this year's contest took place at the NARL-NCREE from September 23-25. The event attracted 100 teams with about 500 students. Among them, 14 teams were under the graduate level, 41 teams the undergraduate level, and 41 teams the high school level. Thirty one teams were from Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore.

In this year’s match, each of the high school and undergraduate teams was requested to design and construct a building model in 6.5 hours. The models were then loaded with a 7.5 kg iron block. On the other hand, each of the postgraduate teams was requested to build a seismic structure model with the concepts of energy dissipation and/or seismic isolation. Each layer of the four-layer models was then loaded with a 10 kg iron block. Those models passed the loading evaluation were then subjected to seismic tests on a shaking table with simulated earthquakes of increasing intensities.

For the outcome of the competition, in the high school level, the team from National Hsinchu Senior Industrial Vocational School of Taiwan outperformed the runner-up team from National Yuanlin Agricultural and Industrial Vocational High School of Taiwan, followed by the team of Henderson Secondary School of Singapore. In the undergraduate level, the top honor went to the team from National University of Singapore, followed by Korea’s Keimyung University, and Singapore Polytechnic. And in the graduate school level, the team from the University of the Philippines Diliman was the champion, followed by National Taiwan University of Science and Technology and National Taiwan University.

After the competition, the participants have the opportunity to witness the earthquake early warning system (EEWS) developed by the NARL-NCREE. This EEWS is capable of sending out warnings within seconds on the arrival of primary waves before the arrival of destructive secondary or shear waves so to reduce the earthquake disaster impacts.