Outreach

Outreach and Education:

Our team had a strong participation in NanoDays. This is a recurring event on NC State’s campus in which local elementary, middle and high school students are invited to tour physical laboratories and interact with college students and faculty working in fields related to nanoscale technology. This activity saw 400+ area students visit Prof. Krim’s Nanoscale Tribology lab and offices. The students spoke with graduate students, saw functioning equipment, and played a simple tribo-electric coke-can race to engage hands-on with the fundamentals of physics. As part of NanoDays our team also talked to students from 65 local elementary school students about basic ideas in science and playing simple games to generate their interest science and engineering careers as well as a lifetime of science engagement.

In a separate activity, Krim’s laboratory also co-hosted about 60 elementary and high school students from the local area, where the students were offered access to cutting-edge research in nanoscale materials and technology. As the students passed through our laboratories, there were question and answer sessions with the graduate students as well as an interactive demonstration to keep them engaged and present them with simple-but-critical aspects of physical science. Departments involved included Physics, Chemistry, and Mech. and Aerospace Engineering.

As a portion of their credit for a 300-level Environmental Science course, a group of undergraduate students visited our laboratory facilities and learned about the work of our DMREF collaboration. Principles, techniques, and objectives of the Nanoparticle project were shared with these students. The DMREF initiative is working to revolutionize the future of materials for a better and cleaner world, an idea which dovetails seamlessly with the core principles of an Environmental Science curriculum.

We have also begun working with a student intern from the local high school who is testing and refine the instructions and materials for a granular-packing-friction outreach experiment. The intent is to ensure the quality and clarity of the experiment for primary and secondary school students. This outreach-oriented, low-cost experiment mimics work which we do with nanoparticles in our DMREF research program. For the students who engage with this citizen-scientist design, there are two expectations. They will gain insight into particles, interfaces, and granular packing. Beyond their learning, our expectation is that by distributing this instructional experiment design to a large and diverse set of young investigators and asking for their feedback, we are crowd-sourcing the search for novel particle-mediated friction behaviors.

One of the supported graduate students, Colin Curtis also visited Carrboro High School’s Advanced Placement Chemistry class to share the vision and scope of the DMREF Nanoparticle project at NC State. Spending an hour with the students, the objectives and some preliminary results of the collaboration were shared, followed by a question and answer session.