Bringing students to the mountain: developing partnerships to introduce students to cutting-edge research

Abstract

Many materials science education and outreach activities are designed to be easy and cost-effective to implement in K-12 classrooms. While these activities are extremely effective at teaching broad materials science concepts such as size and scale, materials properties, and the use of tools in science, they do not connect very closely to the work being done in materials science research laboratories. In an effort to more closely connect our outreach efforts to the work being done by our researchers, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (UW-MRSEC) has developed a partnership with Hitachi High Technologies America, Inc. This partnership allows us to introduce public audiences to a state-of-the-art tabletop scanning electron microscope (SEM) that is being used by UW researchers. In this paper, we describe the partnership including the use of the SEM in our Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program and in our community outreach programs. © 2013 SPIE.