Characterization at the Nano-scale for Undergraduate and High School Students:

This program aims to expose high school students to exciting fundamentals of materials science via direct through materials characterization. This program will make use of interactive web-based teaching tools and virtual laboratories. The virtual laboratories will be offered as elective options for high school students in grades 11 and 12. The classes will involve simple examples of failure analysis, for example, a fatigued screw, a broken shaft from a car engine, or a failed electronic component, e.g., a capacitor. The students will be able to access the scanning electron microscope remotely from workstations in their schools and make observations of the various class examples. In this way, all types of schools may participate in the project, ensuring access to underprivileged schools. This will probably involve a moderately slow internet connection. Hence, these same students will be afforded the opportunity to carry out the same experiments in one of the software classrooms at OSU.

Previous Success:
While the program has yet to be implemented as a “remote” class, a similar module was developed for the Center’s high school intern program. In this module, juniors and seniors in high school characterized, as a function of temperature, the fracture toughness of a 316 stainless steel. They produced a graph showing the ductile to brittle transformation temperature, and correctly identified distinctive features that caused the material to fail in a ductile manner.