KILLYGORDON, County Donegal, Ireland—Thanks to the Information Age, events that take place half a world away from this rural Irish countryside tend to grab students' attention. At Dromore National School in the northwest corner of the country, teacher Michael McMullin has found a way to turn that spark of media-generated interest into the study of "a field which spans science, geography, math, and many other curricular areas." In a word: earthquakes.

He started by having his fifth- and sixth-graders in this school of 150 students sign up for e-mail reports generated by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center. After two months on the BigQuake mailing list, students had received details from all over the globe about 53 earthquakes. They condensed basic facts about each quake and listed them on index cards.

"We made a wall chart of all the facts and put it up alongside a map of the world," McMullin explains. Then they attached strings to show where the quakes were happening.

Using graphing software, students generated a variety of charts and graphs to compare data about the temblors. The visual displays helped students see trends and patterns, and those insights led them to form some sophisticated questions about earthquakes.

For answers, they turned to experts at the USGS, e-mailing their questions off into cyberspace. "We were delighted when Mr. John Lahr [with the USGS] answered them for us," says McMullin. Delighted maybe, but not content. "Mr. Lahr provided answers to some of the questions on the children's list, but omitted one or two. We were feeling cheeky enough to ask him to complete the set," he says, "and were amazed to receive his complete responses."

After all that hard work, "we decided to have some fun," the teacher relates. Students generated all sorts of earthquake-related games—word searches, crossword puzzles, scrambled definitions. The school Web page includes the games, along with digital photos of the students' earthquake investigation and other recent science projects. Dromore students dive into a variety of hands-on learning adventures, from building worm bins for composting to making a geodesic dome out of newspaper tubes. And if they find themselves puzzling over tough questions, they don't hesitate to search the globe for expert answers.