Bringing Educators Together at Network Workshop

One of the missions of the Arkansas Discovery Network is capacity building at the partner museums, to improve upon what they offer the public. One way we do that is with Educator Workshops. A few weeks ago educators from around the Network got together at the Museum of Discovery to learn how to better present Nanotechnology to their visitors. Educators from each museum shared what has worked and hasn’t worked as far as teaching Nano to the public, and especially children in the younger grades who present a special challenge with this sometimes hard-to-comprehend subject.

Mindy Porter shares her experience attenting the NiseNET nano workshop at the Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Jill Kary, from Arkansas State University Museum in Jonesboro summed up the biggest benefit from the network workshops: “Hearing the ideas of others who work with Nano was extremely helpful.”

The network is a part of a national network called NISEnet, which has provided partners with the Nanotechnology: What’s the Big Deal traveling exhibit and NanoDays activities kits, as well as unlimited free resources on it’s website, nisenet.org and a workshop for museum educators around the country.

Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Two representatives from NISEnet and the Children’s Museum of Houston, Keith Ostfeld and Aaron Guerrero  were on hand to share their experiences and explain the new NanoDays kits that many of the partners have received this year and in years past.

Mindy Porter from Mid-America Science Museum attended the nano workshop put on by NiseNET and shared what she learned with fellow educators. She said this about the network workshop: “I enjoyed hearing ideas from my fellow AR museum educators. I also learned a lot when Keith showed us the Nano Days kit activities. It was great to hear the extra ideas and tips on how to make the activities extra special.”

Brenda Hengel added, “The best part was actually spending time with Aaron and Keith – putting faces to names. It’s great to have them as a Nano resource! Always good to go over what Nano is and isn’t for review. And hearing Mindy’s presentation on her Nano trip to San Francisco was a plus.”

Along with Keith and Aaron, Gled Rexha and Enka Dervishi from the Nanotechnology Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock shared their views from actually working with Nanotechnology and museum programs they have held.

UALR at Nanotechnogy Educators Meeting

Hearing from people actually working in the field is very important to those trying to teach. As Alice Penrod, of Texarkana Museums System, said “Hearing the ideas of others who work with Nano was extremely helpful.”

We are planning to publish several nanotechnology experiments to try at home to make this topic more simple to understand and to show it’s real-world applications. We have one blog entry already explaining the smallness of this big topic. Stay tuned for more!

You can see more pics of the network’s Nanotechnology Educator’s Workshop on our flickr page!

Who Says Small Can’t Be Powerful?

When I was young, I remember hearing the words “good things come in small packages” over and over again. (Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I was the youngest of the family, and the shortest among my peers.) Back then I had my own concept of small — a puppy, kitten, a piece of candy, a diamond ring. And I always rooted for the smallest, seemingly weakest, and fell in love with the runts of the litters.

In today’s world, the concept of small has taken on an entirely new meaning, and I am fascinated with it. Things so small you can’t even see them in a microscope, in fact you can’t see them with anything, because light doesn’t work when things get that small. The only way to “see” or study these objects is to feel them with other tiny tiny objects. Scientists need special tools and equipment to work on the nanoscale, because regular tools like scissors are way too big! This is the world of nanotechnology.

Learn all about the tiny tiny tiny world all around us at Nanotechnology: What's the Big Deal

Nanotechnology focuses on things that are measured in nanometers, like atoms and molecules, which are the basic building blocks of our world. Scientists and engineers study this tiny tiny world and make new materials and tiny devices. With nanotechnology, they can make things such as smaller, faster computer chips and new medicines to treat diseases like cancer.

So, if you can’t see a nanometer and you need special tools to “feel” them and work with them, just how small is it? It’s a hard concept to grasp, so hopefully this activity will give you a better idea.

Materials

• Paper ruler (download PDF here)
• Scissors
• Book
• Human hair
• Your finger

Just how small is a nanometer?

The paper ruler you downloaded is 20 centimeters long — a fifth of a meter. Do you think you can cut it down to a nanometer in size? Cut it in half so you have a piece that’s 10 centimeters long. Keep cutting the ruler in half as many times as you can. How small a piece can you get before you can’t cut it any more?

I bet you didn’t manage to cut the paper ruler down to a nanometer! A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That’s really small! Most people can’t cut the paper smaller than about a millimeter. (The lines on the ruler mark millimeters.) A nanometer is a million times smaller than that!

Pick up  your book and look at the thickness of an individual page. On average, pages are about 100,000 nanometers thick. Pull out one of your hairs and look at it. A very fine human hair is about 10,000 nanometers wide, which is the smallest thing we can see with the human eye. Now, look at your fingernail. It grows about one nanometer per second.

Credits and rights: This activity was adapted from: “Education and Outreach: Cutting It Down to Nano,” developed by the National Science Foundation-supported Internships in Public Science Education (IPSE) Educator Resources, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center on Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The original activity is available at mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/IPSE/educators/activities/supplements/cuttingNano-Handout.pdf. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-0532536.

Some information and graphic picked up from Northwestern University’s Discover Nano and from nanowerk.com.

This is the first in a series of Nano-related activities. Stay tuned on Tuesdays for more Nano activities as well as other topics such as dissecting your speech and the strength of shapes. For activities already published in this blog, look under the Categories menu to the right and select “Try this at home!“