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Eleven students from Glenbrook North and Evanston Township High Schools trekked through the snow to Northwestern on Sunday, December 11, for a series of activities designed to spark their interest in nanoscience and technology. First, students toured the labs of Professors John Ketterson, Venkat Chandrasekhar, and William Halperin. Students learned how small a nanometer is, how to trap very small particles using laser tweezers, how transistors are made, and how to get things really, really cold — as The tour then switched gears to allow the students to engage in hands-on, inquiry-and-design based laboratory activities that involved building model atomic-force microscopes (AFM) out of LEGO blocks, building model “samples” from the materials provided (see pictures), and acquiring data that was then imaged using a 3D-surface plotting function in Excel. High-school teacher Nate Unterman, NCLT postdoc Emma Tevaarwerk, and Senior Lecturer Arthur Schmidt of Physics & Astronomy facilitated the activities. Students were purposely given little instruction on how to build the LEGO microscopes; this forced them to come up with their own solutions to the problems they encountered. Each group constructed a unique AFM and surface sample. They also determined their own sample imaging conditions and plotting criteria. Once acquired, the data was graphed in Excel and analyzed by the students. These activities were developed by Glenbrook North High School teachers Nathan Unterman and Marcel Gridnic as part of the National Center for Learning and Teaching's professional development program this past summer, at Northwestern University. Students were taken to EPIC center to see a real atomic force microscope in action. Emma Tevaarwerk helped them to image iron boride nanowires grown by a graduate student in Professor R.P.H. Chang’s lab group. Students said that it was cool to see the real AFM, but building the LEGO models was most helpful in understanding how an AFM works. |
 Physics graduate student Johannes Pollanen shows how liquid nitrogen can be solidified by pumping on it. |
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At the end of the activities, students were invited back for ongoing work in Northwestern labs, as part of an effort to engage them in nanoscience and technology activities on a regular basis. If you are interested in attending the next NanoDay at Northwestern, please contact Emma Tevaarwerk at (847) 467-2489 or emmat@northwestern.edu. The next NanoDay is slotted for late January/early February of 2006. |
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