Session Q7: Undergraduate Nanotechnology and Materials Physics Education II

The Role of Engineering Design in Materials Science and Engineering Curricula

Undergraduate materials engineering curricula diverge from materials science curricula in two important ways. An underlying requirement is to prepare the graduates for industrial positions, so they need a good grounding in processing and statistical methods, as well as a strong set of hands-on skills in materials characterization and metrology. The other distinguishing feature of an engineering education is the focus on design rather than research. In the case of materials science and engineering, the design deliverable is often a process design, a materials selection, or a failure analysis. Some of the features of education for design include the exercise of thinking about the customer's needs, functional requirements of the product, the cost of production, and the broader context of the design project in society. These ideas can be integrated or at least introduced early in the curriculum and in many different types of courses. Materials Science and Engineering programs have the dual requirement of educating both future scientists and future engineers. Graduating baccalaureate students need to be ready for engineering practice, yet many also are being readied for graduate study and research. One aspect of this ambiguity is that \textit{research} and \textit{design} activities are not always as clearly differentiated as they are in other engineering programs. How can one undergraduate curriculum be successful at both? One key distinguishing element in engineering practice is \textit{engineering design}. Design activities occur in many aspects of the profession and may be practiced by both scientists and engineers; however it is engineering curricula, not science curricula, that tend to explicitly focus on developing the skills and methods of design practice in students. Accredited programs within colleges of engineering are required to emphasize engineering practice and design, while still providing the necessary conceptual development of the underlying science. Current practices and emerging ideas concerned with these aspects of materials education will be presented in this talk.   

What Quantum Dots Can Do for You

Recent clever techniques for fabricating nanosize materials, one-atomic-layer-at-a-time, have simultaneously opened a door to a fantastic adventure at the frontier of physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Nanosize materials simply do not behave as the bulk. Indeed, the rules that govern the growth and behavior of these tiny structures are unexplored. In this talk we will discuss our recent efforts to be the architect of their shape, size, density, and position of nanostructures and along the way, the interactions between them that lead to their optical and electrical behavior. While self-assembly is providing exciting quantum dot (QD) structures to explore, like the QD molecules shown here, it is equally exciting to try to use the rules we uncover to encourage QD formation to take a desired path. Can we understand the formation of faceted nanostructures? Can we encourage or seed dot structures to form specific arrays? Is it possible to engineer greater homogeneity of dot shape and size? Can we design both the optical and electrical behavior of either individual or arrays of nanostructures to mimic those we find in nature? In this talk we will review our progress to answer these questions and discuss the possibilities and challenges ahead. For example, we will discuss the formation of individual faceted nanostructures as well as the fabrication of a vertically and laterally ordered QD stacks forming three-dimensional QD arrays. As another example, we will discuss the importance of surfaces with high Miller indices, as a template to the formation of nanostructures as well as their potential role in determining the shape and increased size uniformity of the confined structures. Importantly, these observations lead to an even more basic question of when and why high index surfaces are stable. Indeed, we have found that in order to understand the origin of high index surfaces that bound nanostructures we have to study them directly.   

An Interdisciplinary Program in Materials Science at James Madison University.

Over the past decade a core group of faculty at James Madison University has created an interdisciplinary program in materials science that provides our students with unique courses and research experiences that augment the existing, high-quality majors in physics and astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, geology and environmental science, mathematics and statistics, and integrated science and technology. The university started this program by creating a Center for Materials Science whose budget is directly allocated by the provost. This source of funds acts as seed money for research, support for students, and a motivating factor for each of the academic units to support the participation of their faculty in the program. Courses were created at the introductory and intermediate level that are cross-listed by the departments to encourage students to enroll in them as electives toward their majors. Furthermore, the students are encouraged to participate in undergraduate research in materials since this is the most fundamental unifying theme across the disciplines. This talk will cover some of the curricular innovations that went into the design of the program to make it successful, examples of faculty and student research and how that feeds back into the classroom, and success stories of the interactions that have developed between departments because of this program. Student outcomes and future plans to improve the program will also be discussed.   

Use of clickers and sustainable reform in upper-division physics courses

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, successful reforms of our freshmen and sophomore-level physics courses are now being extended to upper-division courses, including Mechanics, Math Methods, QM, E{\&}M, and Thermal Physics. Our course reforms include clicker questions (ConcepTests) in lecture, peer instruction, and an added emphasis on conceptual understanding and qualitative reasoning on homework assignments and exams. Student feedback has been strongly positive, and I will argue that such conceptual training improves rather than dilutes, traditional, computationally-intensive problem-solving skills. In order for these reforms to be sustainable, reform efforts must begin with department-wide consensus and agreed-upon measures of success. I will discuss the design of good clicker questions and effective incorporation into upper-level courses, including examples from materials science. Condensed matter physics, which by nature involve intelligent use of approximation, particularly lends itself to conceptual training. I will demonstrate the use of a clicker system (made by iClicker) with audience-participation questions. Come prepared to think and interact, rather than just sit there!   

Thinking like a physicist: Condensed Matter and Materials Physics in the \textit{Paradigms in Physics} Curriculum at Oregon State University

The Paradigms in Physics Program at Oregon State University organizes the upper-division undergraduate physics curriculum to blur traditional subdisciplinary boundaries and makes use of many interactive pedagogic techniques. Condensed matter physics and materials science content appear in many places in the early curriculum, culminating in a capstone course in solid state physics where students calculate band structure of real materials related to their research projects. A mix of analytic, computational, and research approcahes are employed to include, for example, traditional topics like doping in semiconductors and modern topics like carbon nanotubes.