Week One Posts

Week One: Materials McGuyver

In this course, students are given the choice to choose their freshman design project based on major, interests, and deliverables. This section is focused on Materials Science & Engineering and this specific project is themed in Materials education and outreach. The objective is to create a highly visual yet low cost visual demonstration of a single material property, in this case thermal expansion. The demonstration should be easy to understand, geared towards visual learners, and should visually display the difference in the degrees of thermal expansion in different materials. Expected technical challenges involving the preparation of the project are: forming an idea for the demonstrations and model, acquiring the materials for the demonstration, and successfully simulating thermal expansion. The major tasks at hand are making and planning demonstrations that can quickly show thermal expansion and making a simple model that explains the phenomenon at an atomic scale. The final deliverables of this project are three demonstrations of thermal expansion and a model.

This project is motivated by the need to create demonstrators to educate middle school and high school students about a specific material property, thermal expansion. It has been reported that while more than half of a surveyed group of students aged 10-17 were interested in STEM careers, a third of their parents openly stated that their children were not being prepared or motivated enough to become successful in STEM careers. In order to teach students with no background in thermodynamics the basics of thermal expansion and motivate them to pursue math and science courses, the model has to be very simple but still capture the basics of the phenomenon. In order to complete this task, four demonstrators will be used to create a comprehensive presentation on the subject. Three of these demonstrators will show the effects of thermal expansion on the macroscopic scale in real time and the fourth will be a simple model to show what causes thermal expansion on the atomic scale. When the project is finished, the goal is to leave the the audience with a solid foundation of the subject of thermal expansion.

There are five team members in Group 15: Mika Awai, Luc Cassagnol, Anna Desch, Mark Petrovic, and Kirstin Snodgrass. Mark Petrovic is the Team Leader and Researcher, Anna Desch is in charge of the Lab Notebook, Luc Cassagnol is the Tester and Fabricator, Mika Awai is the Analyst, and Kirstin Snodgrass is the Blogmeister and Researcher.

During the first week, not only did we assign each of the team member roles, but we brainstormed three demonstration ideas, a model to show atomic levels of thermal expansion, researched thermal expansion extensively, and wrote a formal proposal for our design project. Next week, we will begin ordering materials and finalizing the concepts of the demonstrations.