Earthquakes occur suddenly and cause severe damage to the infrastructures of our modern societies, leading to high numbers of casualties. These events are unavoidable, but their impact can be significantly mitigated. They remain unpredictable even with our current scientific knowledge. Moreover, although they are both worrying and fascinating to us.

This is why emphasis must be placed on awareness, especially in the school system where the causes and effects of these hazards are studied. The idea of an educational seismic network arose in the United States with the Princeton Earth Physics Project (PEPP) proposed by Nolet and Phinney in 1993 (Steinberg et al., 2000). Pursuing the same objective, an educational seismic network was initiated in France in 1995 and is still active after 25 years.

Today, many other educational seismic networks exist around the world, including the United States, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Australia, Nepal, Taiwan, Haiti, and more, providing an indication of the importance of and need for distributing seismic sensors to schools for educational purposes. The installation of seismometers at schools promotes learning based on original records. Such learning makes students familiar with scientific data. With acquired experience, students can download other data from environmental agencies for their own investigations. The program also allows for collaboration between teachers and researchers in order to better collect and analyze the seismic data. Such interactions allow teachers to develop teaching materials for their classes. Moreover, this teaching material is provided on a website to other educators within the same discipline. It has been observed that these online resources have been used by a broader community of teachers in many fields, including natural sciences, history, geography, and social sciences.

Through this unique, long-term experience, this paper contributes to answering the following questions: how and why has the French educational system evolved over time and benefited from the deployment of a dedicated seismic network? Why is collecting scientific data inside a school important for both teachers and students? How have motivated teachers been able to expand online educational exercises to studying their own data and the data that has become increasingly available on the web? How have such original educational resources been shared with other teachers across school and national boundaries? What skills and support are needed to maintain an active educational network? Why can we not rely only on the open data sets available on the web? How has such an experience impacted French teaching programs?

In 1995, thanks to the PEPP initiative, the design of a dedicated educational seismometer began in France, including a broadband three-component velocimeter associated with a 24-bit high dynamic digitizer synchronized by GPS with a precision of 1 ms (Fig. 1a). It was installed at the International Campus of Valbonne (CIV; pilot school). This sensor and its control card were monitored via a personal computer and a telephone line. In order to share scientific information between schools, the automatic nightly gathering of time-windowed records of local, regional, and long-distance events, when strong enough, was generated from the earthquake catalogs of international agencies. At that time, seismic sensors and related seismograms were more or less an abstraction for the school community. The first active group of 12 high school students was created, meeting weekly to share the analyses of seismograms from the station and related information collected through newspapers. This very committed group was supervised by a teacher who interacted closely researcher, and both were involved in this prototype project at the CIV. For the very first time, students had immediate access to global earthquake seismicity from the seismometer within their school. The seismometer and its records provided some concrete aspects to virtual questions related to seismic hazards and to the knowledge of the Earth's structure, which are key scientific topics for French high school education. Students and teachers tracked seismic events, such as the Chi-Chi earthquake (Fig. 1b), and other natural or anthropogenic vibrations (sea swell, human activity, quarry blasts, etc.).

In 1996, the French Ministry of Education decided to connect all the schools to the internet for student training. However, these institutions were very concerned about the added pedagogical value of using the internet in schools. The seismic network thus benefited from this advancement in connectivity; the prototype seismometer was connected to the network. The first online educational seismic database was born. Teachers in other schools were able to work on the online seismic data sets. At the same time, regional political concerns focused on the education of young people about natural hazard awareness in one of the most active seismic zones in France. The prototype station demonstrated that an in-school seismic network to promote educational program was possible. A first financial grant was given to the Alpes Maritimes region. A network of five schools equipped with three-component broadband sensors was set up in the south of France (regional deployment in Fig. 1c; Virieux et al., 2000) and proved to be so successful that the extension to a national configuration was proposed. The organization of such a network was based on voluntary proposals from a team of teachers. The equipment was provided free of charge, while maintenance was the responsibility of the volunteer school.

This network, which is constantly increasing, has been supported by different regional and national funds. In 2006, the French national Sciences à l'École organization integrated the existing Sismo des écoles network into their national educational projects. This cooperation enabled the transformation of local actions into widespread initiatives. The network, renamed SISMOS à l'École, was first deployed on a national level, followed by international deployment in French schools abroad, as illustrated in Figure 1c. This figure shows the role of the professional and educational sensors. (See the data availability section at the end of the paper for further details.) In order to fulfill the educational target of seismic hazard education and scientific approaches, having teachers who are well trained in seismological skills as an interface between teachers and researchers is mandatory and requires specific workshops. Each school with an installed sensor has an identified researcher (one teacher is paired with one researcher who acts as a mentor). Researchers have comprehensive knowledge of seismic phenomena and teachers have the pedagogical skills to describe these phenomena to students. Researchers have also contributed to the numerous training sessions through scientific refresher lectures. Furthermore, the researchers also use the network's data sets to integrate them into the seismicity study of the considered areas (Berenguer et al., 2013; their Fig. 6).

In 2017, the University of Côte d'Azur took over with a program called Educational Mediterranean Observatory (shortened to EduMed-Obs; http://edumed.unice.fr, last access: 6 December 2020). EduMed-Obs focuses on implementing an interface based on a geoscience data set concerning the Mediterranean basin. The theme does not only focus on seismology; landslides, meteorology, hydrology, and sea-level variations are also considered. Data mining is developing and has become more important in current teaching programs (Bigot-Cormier and Berenguer, 2017). These data sets are intended not only for middle and high schools but also for university students. EduMed-Obs also provides data sets from research centers. This aspect is important for strengthening the visibility of the activities of research institutes. It is an excellent opportunity for students to compare data sets from their own sensors with research data sets. Making communities aware, through student training, of the role of Earth science observatories is crucial and promotes a better understanding of the seismological (and environmental) nature of the territory in which students live. How these observatories participate in our seismic risk awareness is also better understood by governmental structures, leading to improved territorial management such as tsunami mitigation. This new educational observatory already includes some 70 European schools in the countries around the Mediterranean that host sensors and which implement scientific teaching focused on natural risk education (schools map available at http://edumed.unice.fr/fr/le-reseau-edumed, last access: 6 December 2020). The schools that are twinned within this network can share their experiences of natural risks along the Mediterranean coast. EduMed-Obs is a partner of many innovative field camp training courses organized around the Mediterranean, like “InsegnaciEtna 2019” in Sicily (http://site.ietna.eu/, last access: 6 December 2020). This expertise is already being exported through initiatives in central America, where a network is being built on the Caribbean arc from Haiti to Venezuela via the French West Indies (http://edumed.unice.fr/fr/eduseis, last access: 6 December 2020). The recent creation of EduMed-Obs and its present and future actions are directly inspired by the feedback from the teachers involved in this project over the past 25 years. Below, we propose a description of the key points mentioned by the teachers over the years.

Teachers have reported a number of positive points from their experience, including the students' enthusiasm for recording quakes, the ease of understanding online databases, the development of autonomy, students' responsibility in managing a seismological station, and the importance of natural risks within the theme of sustainable development. One of the great strengths of the network has been its integration into teaching programs, and it has fulfilled various expected educational objectives, such as the following: -

practice a scientific approach,

All teachers agree on the fact that the presence of a seismometer at school is of great importance for the fulfillment of the main objectives of scientific culture and seismic risk education. Many other seismological networks for educational purposes have also emerged in Europe and around the world. Such educational programs have shown a positive impact among students (Zollo et al., 2014). Educational seismological networks also draw their strength from the interaction between teachers and researchers, which has occurred under various circumstances. If citizen science and educational seismology occupy such a prominent place in society today, it is because they ask for citizen commitment on important issues such as the prevention of seismic risk and, more generally, of natural risks. Schools play a central role when addressing a young public. The place of scientific research is also essential for better mitigation of natural hazards and for better understanding of the anthropogenic impact on environmental systems. Therefore, through this long-standing educational program with the driving motivation of building a seismic network across different educational communities in Europe, we must definitely focus on prevention through education. Educational seismology networks do more because they encourage students to adopt a scientific approach based on observation and measurement, enabling them to understand the causes of earthquakes, the internal dynamics of the globe – and to learn how the systems behave.

Similar programs can be developed in other countries if the education system in those countries is taken into account. However, one of the strongest elements for success is the training of educators, who are a key ingredient of the program. This training has followed teachers throughout the last few years. Indeed, any new educational project must support teachers by ensuring that they improve their scientific skills, specifically in Earth sciences. In order to achieve this goal, bringing teachers closer to researchers in a reciprocal interaction is important. Other key elements are the use of friendly, usable technical tools for manipulating scientific data and teaching resources, including learning aspects and assessment items. The way these features are developed is country dependent. Over the years, the French program has taken care to develop these activities (training courses, seminars, and conferences) for the various users, such as students, teachers, and researchers.

Thus, teaching seismology using real, recent data from online sensors gives a lot of satisfaction to students and teachers alike. This experience with educational seismology has now enabled the University of Côte d'Azur to set up an educational observatory of the Mediterranean environment (EduMed). This observatory offers a data center for teaching topics beyond seismology. Thus, using a similar educational approach, students and teachers have access to hydrogeological data with a range of diversity (river characteristics and karstic cave distribution). Meteorological data (rain, wind, and temperature) are another set of physical data to be analyzed and understood. Data from buoys at sea provide crucial data for the oceanic realm.

Over its first 3 years of operation, the access to various quantitative physical data related to the environment has allowed students to investigate different environmental subjects with the help of teachers in different disciplines who have different teaching expertise and interests. This extended program has broadened student skills, their education of natural risks, and their awareness of their natural and societal environments.

Finally, the challenge of educational seismology is the improved training of our students in Earth sciences so that they have a better understanding of how science is constructed and how it progresses. Undoubtedly, trained citizens are better equipped to face their future with a strengthened science–citizen link, and scientific vocations are the rewards of such innovative and attractive training.