Education: K-12 Programs: A Nanoleap into New Science

Remote Access Activities

We are developing and testing two educational remote access activities in conjunction with the NanoLeap program - one for the “Physical Science” module and one for the “Chemistry” module. The NNIN sites involved in this initial round are: SNF at Stanford, the Characterization Facility at U. of Minnesota, and the Microelectronics Research Center at Georgia Tech.

The Physical Science remote access activity involves Stanford and Minnesota and explores the use of an atomic force microscope, or AFM, that can probe nanoscale features, and the concepts of: scale, the nanoworld, imaging techniques, and adhesion. Live video from the two NNIN sites is beamed to the classroom. The students are able to view the characterization lab and equipment, the AFM and computer monitors, all in real time, and also see and talk with the researchers via phone conference call. We recently had our first demos involving two Physical Science high school classses in Colorado - one with Chris Nichols' class at Englewood HS and the other with Frank Nosal's class at Eaglecrest HS in Centennial, each of which had previously gone throught the in-class Nanoleap module in physical science. The activity involved myself at Stanford and Greg Haugstad and Jinping Dong at Minnesota. Gregory Book at Georgia Tech also participated by answering students' questions.

We have also been developing a remote access activity for the classes that are participating in the Nanoleap module for Chemistry classes. This activity focused on cleanrooms, nanofabrication and contamination, and what researchers in nanotechnology do. In this one we made use of Georgia Tech's cleanroom and the collection of high-resolution Axis network webcams they have in each of the rooms throughout their cleanroom facility. The activity involved myself at Stanford and Gregory Book from Georgia Tech, as well as a graduate student there, Swami Rajaraman. Greg Haugstad was also available to answer questions from the U. of Minn. The activity was done with Nicole Harmer's chemistry class at Brainerd High School in Minnesota.

To see an 11 minute informational video of these remote access educational activities, click on the link below to play the file. (If there is a problem with this, you can right click on the file name and "Save link as..." to download the file to your computer. Then you can play the video directly on your computer by clicking on the downloaded file.)

Nanoleap Remote-Access Video (new!)

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