Thinking Big by Going Small: GIFT Fellows Explore Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech by Andrew Kerr January 2007 In the summer of 2006 six teachers had the opportunity to work with Georgia Tech's MiRC through the Georgia Intern-Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) program. They focused on nanotechnology, and performed research that ultimately may lead to more efficient sources of lighting and better batteries. They also learned about the nature of how research is conducted.

After Dr. Nancy Healy became the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) education coordinator at MiRC, she helped write an NSF grant that led to the funding of a handful of teachers in summer research positions. GIFT, which already had access to a talented pool of teachers, stepped in to assist Healy in fielding candidates for those positions. A GIFT teacher's work is never done, as summer work must be implemented into the classroom during the following school year. But these teachers had additional tasks to fulfill as well, due to the source of their funding. "The teachers will come to Tech for a one day workshop before NSTA," Healy explains, "Then, all the teachers will be going to the National Science Teachers Assocation meeting where they will present their lessons." How did the mentors feel about their new summer colleagues? "From all the mentor surveys I've gotten back, everybody was just super happy," Healy reports. The teachers were thrilled, too. "When you're in the classroom a lot of years you kind of lose touch with what's new in research," says teacher Joyce Palmer, physics instructor at Duluth High School, "and what the students, when they leave high school, are exposed to in college." "I learned about breaking new things in the sciences that I wouldn't have gotten to pick up as a teacher," says Kaye Sheets of Patrick Henry High School. "When I do staff development units, usually what I get is how to teach pedagogy, that type of thing. But here I was getting actual things, like nanotechnology!" And nanotechnology is cutting-edge stuff. Sheets acknowledges that "It's just like when we started doing space research back in the 50's and 60's." Palmer, and John Nice of South Gwinnett High School worked with Dr. Kevin Martin to come up with data that would help clean room operators understand why their data might be off. "A lot of people utilize the equipment," Palmer explains, "and a lot of time they have their own 'recipes'. The problem is that when the next person comes in to use the clean room, if they don't recognize that those gas levels have been changed, pressure has been changed, temperatures have been changed, then they don't get the results they expected. So our job was to go in and actually change the parameters of the machines to create a set of data that they could look at and compare, so that they could find out that, say, this particular gas may have been changed to that level when it should be something else." Sheets worked with Dr. Alan Doolittle (see our interview with Dr. Doolittle here) on creating tiny batteries. "Basically what he is doing is he is trying to make a battery that can store energy that's very very microscopic," she says. "So it has to be able to store a large amount of energy at a low cost. He's looking for one that can do the same thing as more expensive batteries currently on the market, but for less cost." This is definitely state-of-the-art research. So how does a teacher bring that back to the classroom? "I tried to stress to the teachers, a lot of the work they were doing is kinda way out there, if you think about," admits Healy. "So I said to them, 'Let's think about writing lessons, how would you fit this into what you already teach?' " For Palmer it meant modifying some of her existing lesson plans with nano hooks. In previous years, her classes had created Rube Goldberg type contraptions. "I decided to incorporate a nano part into it: smart memory wires," she explains. "My idea was that the Rube Goldberg devices had to be triggered by a smart memory wire--a wire that if you have it set so that it's straight, if you bend it and then heat it up it returns to its original shape." [see the video demonstrations above and Dr. Ken Sandhage's demonstration of such a wire here.] Sheets also came up with a novel illustration of the difficulties of doing nanotechnology. "I asked my students, 'How many of you are really good Lego builders?' So we selected the four who were the best. Then I said, 'Wait a minute, we're talking nano here, so either we have to make the Legos really really tiny or your hands really really big!' So I then I had them put on big Mickey Mouse gloves!" In addition to spreading the nanotechnology gospel, the teachers also improved upon educational materials developed in the lab."We have a unit called Exploring Nano through Consuming Products," Healy explains. "The teachers reviewed the PowerPoint and said, 'That's somebody else's PowerPoint. I need notes. I can't use somebody else's PowerPoint because I don't know what to say about that slide.' Now every slide has teacher notes. So I think it improved the lesson plan. "The other major impact," she says, "is that all these teachers are developing units that will eventually go onto our website and be used in workshops and will be teacher tested. These are things they think will be meaningful in helping kids understand what nano is and how it can be applied." The lesson plans will be available at a number of web-based locations, including the National Center for Learning and Teaching in Nanoscale Science and Engineering site and the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network. Teachers also learned about the nature of research. "One teacher said to me, 'This isn't what you want to hear, but I'm finding that research doesn't go quickly, and it doesn't go in a straight line,' Healy says. "And I said, 'That's exactly what we want you to learn!'" "It was just a wonderful educational experience for me, and a social experience, too, to be able to see that," says Sheets. "I can bring so much life back to my students thanks to what I've learned!" (The interviews for this article were conducted on January 3, January 4, and January 8, 2007.)