Program - Symposium EEE: Materials Education—Toward a Lab-to-Classroom Initiative

Buried about 100m below the French / Swiss countryside, between the Alps and the Jura Mountains, is a 27km tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This chain of superconducting magnets accelerates protons to very high energies and then collides them at four different places. Surrounding these points are enormous, highly complex particle detectors, each bearing millions of electronic channels, and designed to reconstruct the remnants of the collisions.
The talk describes the LHC, the detectors, the collaborations that built and run them, and the motivation - in fact, necessity - for their existence. Recent physics results, including the world's first glimpse of the Higgs Boson, are presented in the context of addressing our fundamental questions of the universe.

The Materials Genome Initiative aims to integrate computation with experiment and informatics to revolutionize the materials engineering and design process. To achieve this goal Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) students will need to be introduced to computation as an integral part of their disciplinary practice and core knowledge base. We are undertaking a process of weaving computation throughout the MSE curriculum by requiring a discipline-based computation course in their first year of study for MSE majors at Johns Hopkins University. During this class students are introduced to computation through projects relevant to the MSE discipline. We are simultaneously introducing computational content into the core MSE courses covering structures, thermodynamics, kinetics and phase transformations, electronic, optical and magnetic properties, mechanical properties and biological materials. We have collected survey data regarding how such interactions alter students' perception of their computational capabilities and future career goals. We have also collected pre- and post- test data aimed at measuring how using computation in core classes aids in assimilation of core MSE concepts. A small sample of students were also videotaped during think-aloud exercises that were subsequently analyzed with an eye to uncovering relevant questions regarding how disciplinarily grounded computational work influences the student learning process in an MSE context.

The subject of this presentation focusses on how our team built bridge between advanced materials processing, characterization and prototyping R&D and classroom with students from senior high school students, undergraduate students and graduate students. The materials science education and summer training using the state-of-art instrumentation, such as ion implanters, scanning Raman microprobe, AFM, IBAD, MBE, RBS, PIXE, SEM, AES, and many more advanced characterization and testing instrumentation was originally established by the author and his teammates in early 1990 at the Center for Irradiation of Materials in order to enhance the education, research and services capabilities of the university and provide services needed by the aerospace and defense community and local industry. As the result of establishment of this center the annual number of students taking 300, 400 500 level courses as well as summer training courses at this facility reach as high as 60 students per year where 20-30 were summer students, some from local high schools and nearly two dozen graduate students per year used this facility for their advanced research regularly. The success of the courses; special topics on materials processing, materials characterization, and device prototyping, were carefully and individually designed to meet the need of the mix of students’ background attending each course and lab work. The lab-work each advanced research with goal to produce publication were designed with milestone and pre-determined mentor while maintain high standard and progress reporting, oral and in writing, once to twice a week for 10 to 14 weeks. The developed courses and laboratory research conducted were both interdisciplinary, multi-cultural and multi institutions, to include local high-schools, and multi-universities, including universities from Brazil, France, Turkey, Japan, Belarus, and Greece. Most often, students had backgrounds in physics, chemistry, food science, life science, mechanical and electrical engineering. The main focus of the program was to generate enthusiasm, to create interest and to build pipeline of students for materials science education while generating interest on subject matters relevant to surface and interface processing, surface modification and understanding properties of materials.

Nanotechnology and nanoscience have a huge impact on society and are becoming attractive areas of learning at various levels including high schools. These areas have their foundation in high school mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This provides the scientists with an opportunity to embed their knowledge and research into high school curriculum. Teaching students about smallest and largest possible length scales can make them better understand atomic structure and manufacturing processes. Towards this end, providing unique research experience to high school teachers to help them incorporate aspects of nanotechnology in their classroom curriculum is an interesting as well as a challenging avenue. A four week pilot program was established through a team effort including a faculty team leader, a graduate student, and a high school teacher to develop an inquiry-based learning experimental demonstration. This demonstration involved patterning of magnetic nanoparticles on a silicon wafer, a necessary step in device industry specializing in advanced magnetic memory, recording, and storage devices. The approach utilized electromagnetically activated or ‘spiked’ ferrofluid (magnetic nanoparticles dispersed in a viscous/oily solution) for patterning magnetic nanoparticles. An automated motor assembly was used to gradually descend a suspended silicon wafer on spiked ferrofluid. Different parameters such as magnetic field strength, wafer descending speed, and contact depth of the wafer with the ferrofluid were studied and their influence on the pattern formation was evaluated. The project served two-fold purpose; first, the development of a strong partnership with local high school and bringing nanotechnology to the community; second, providing research opportunity to a teacher for designing an engineered approach for patterning magnetic nanoparticles for high schools. Such efforts will also facilitate the development of future work force in nanotechnology and nanoscience and upon incorporation into classroom curriculum will encourage students to opt for sciences and engineering as careers.

The Solar Hydrogen Activity Research Kit (SHArK) Project is an outreach project with the goal of discovering metal oxide semiconductors that can efficiently split water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight. Using the simple, flexible and inexpensive kits created by this project, a “Solar Army” is being created across the country in high schools and colleges to help with the search for efficient and cost effective metal oxide semiconductors using a combinatorial chemistry approach. A SHArK kit was devised to use mostly commercially available parts including Lego Mindstorms® kits, commercial ink jet printers and a 532 nm green laser pointer. Other components of the kit include a custom-built electronics box, custom software, an etched glass electrochemical cell and electrode holders made of copper wire and alligator clips to connect the substrate to the electronics box. The idea is to deposit overlapping patterns of metal oxide precursors onto conductive glass substrates and fire them at around 500 °C to decompose the nitrates into mixed metal oxides. The precursor combinations can be deposited onto conductive glass substrates by one of two methods: pipetting premixed solutions in spots or by using an inkjet printer where the ink in the cartridges is replaced by metal precursor solutions, usually metal nitrate salts. Pipetting is simpler and provides students with the opportunity to practice basic chemical techniques whereas inkjet printing allows the flexibility to creative virtually endless arrays of potentially useful metal oxide semiconductors. With about 60 metals in the periodic table combined to form ternary or quaternary metal oxides, millions of different compositions, some of which will be semiconductors, are possible. After depostion and firing the photoelectrolysis activity of the metal oxide film on the conductive glass is immersed in an electrochemical cell and tested using a Lego® based laser scanner to detect photocurrent generation indivcative of photoelectrolysis activity. The false color photocuurent maps are created to indicate which combinations are promising photocatalysts. Among this multitude of combinations we believe there are many with the electronic properties and stability necessary for splitting water.. Given that it is not yet possible to identify these semiconductors a priori with computational methods, distributed research allows for large numbers of combinations to be produced and screened and for the students to participate in a research project and could help provide a long-term solution to the global energy problem.

Many materials science education and outreach activities are designed to be easy and cost-effective to implement in K-12 classrooms. While these activities are extremely effective at teaching broad materials science concepts such as size and scale, materials properties, and the use of tools in science, they do not connect very closely to the work being done in materials science research laboratories. In an effort to more closely connect our outreach efforts to the work being done by our researchers, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (UW-MRSEC) has developed partnerships with the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (Discovery), a public-private facility that includes state-of-the-art teaching labs, and Hitachi High Technologies America, Inc. These partnerships allow us to introduce public audiences to state-of-the-art facilities and instruments used by UW researchers. In this presentation, we will describe the partnerships UW-MRSEC has established and the resulting education materials we have developed and disseminated. Our experiences will also serve as a template for similar partnerships at other institutions.

Experimental laboratory experiences are needed to supplement classroom lectures at the high school level in our public schools. This is especially true for specialized areas such as nanotechnology. Therefore, we have implemented nanotechnology applications as part of a student project course for high science students. The focus is to provide an interactive hands-on experience in nanofabrication and characterization of nanostructures. The students are assigned to a research project and mentored in performing research in a laboratory setting. They are required to support and lead specific activities within the project, and also produce reports and presentations on their activities. We document student involvement and development during the course.

We have introduced upper level science and engineering students to scientific research concepts through materials characterization using polarized Raman spectroscopy. The theoretical model for intensity dependent Raman spectra was developed using Raman tensors. This model predicted the differences in the Raman intensities as a function of the crystal orientation and the laser polarization direction. Raman spectra were collected from single crystal silicon with different orientations; (100), (110), and (111). An alternate experimental design was adopted for data collection where the incident polarization of the laser light was kept constant and the sample was rotated under the microscope to vary the relative angle between the laser light and crystallographic direction. The intensity dependence of the Raman signal was mapped as a function of the rotational angle. A three dimensional plot of intensity vs. wave number and angle of rotation was generated. The experimental results showed clear differences between the Raman intensity profiles for the three different Si samples. Comparison of the three dimensional experimental results and theoretical predictions demonstrated the accuracy of the theoretical model used. This project based work created an effective method for students to learn about Raman spectroscopy as an effective research tool to characterize semiconductor materials and to acquire theoretical knowledge regarding polarization dependent Raman selection rules.

The concept of energy has recently gained prominence in public consciousness for two broad reasons. The first is the recognition that unless we learn how to transform our ability to harness and use energy, we will not be able to secure future development that is environmentally, economically and geo-politically sustainable. The second is a growing awareness that if we are to tackle the complex task of revamping our energy portfolio, we must increase investment in science education in order to develop a sufficient knowledge base. It should be recognized, however, that the current public awareness of the importance of energy is not necessarily one that has been cultivated long-term but, rather, it arises in reaction to crises, whether economic (such as increased gas prices), environmental (increasing evidence of global warming) or geo-political (global conflicts over traditional energy sources). Scientists at the forefront of energy research have a duty to inform public opinions not just when a particular crisis emerges but through broad and sustained educational outreach efforts. Emerging research on energy harvesting, storage and conversion should be in tandem with deliberate efforts in educating the next generations of scientific minds to deconstruct concepts in energy fluently using their knowledge of the physical sciences. Concepts of energy capture, conversion and storage lend themselves to teaching basic scientific concepts such as charge transport, atomic structure, relationships between electric potential and energy, relationships between chemical and electrical energy, to name just a few. We have shown, through collaborations with local area high schools, that real-world energy-related examples offer a powerful way to teach concepts from state-mandated high school physics and chemistry syllabi. We have developed and launched a pilot digital archive of video modules recorded using “electronic smartboards”. Following the successful example of the Khan Academy, the modules are designed to be about 10 minutes long and to focus on a specific physics or chemistry concept using real-world energy-materials examples. The vision of this program is to introduce “energy literacy”, a functioning fluency of the basic concepts of energy harvesting, consumption, storage and conversion as early in the development of a student as possible.