In materials research, the current funding focus has shifted from largely mechanical-properties based aspects of materials to their molecular-level chemical nature, such as biomaterials or nanoscale phenomenon. Along with this shift in emphasis, we have seen many undergraduate materials programs become absorbed by other programs as a concentration in other engineering majors. Many programs have absolved departments in favor of a model where faculty from a variety of departments have adjunct appointments in, say, an interdisciplinary materials science and engineering program. What exactly is the fate of undergraduate materials programs? Is it time for materials science and engineering undergraduate programs to be absorbed into the sea of interdisciplinarity? In this talk, I will present data on the landscape of trends within the undergraduate materials community against the changes in the global arena. What is our role as materials science and engineering educators in the societal state of flux that we face? What are the opportunities? In an attempt to see into the future, we will consider all these questions.

Through a partnership between the NSF-funded Material Research Science and Engineering Center, Center for Nanoscale Science, at Penn State University and Philadelphia's science museum The Franklin Institute the "Nano-Bio: Zoom in on Life!" program has been produced and distributed to 20 science and children museums in the United States and one science museum in Canada. Distributed shows include the materials needed to perform the demonstration, supplies for a year and additional information including educational materials and a training video. This cart based program includes interactive demonstrations that highlight processes in the human body that occur at the nanoscale and how scientists are exploring natural processes to develop new nanotechnology and nanomaterials. This show is the second in a series of collaborations to create programs for the informal science education world. A development team including Penn State University faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and Franklin Institute staff worked over two years to develop the show. Instrumental in the development were graduate students who were part of a jointly run Penn State-Franklin Institute NSF-funded Internships in Public Science Education (IPSE) program. These science education graduate students helped create, test, and enhance the demonstrations for the Zoom in on Life program.

Nanoscience is an area that promises a new understanding of nature, while nanotechnology is the use of nanoscience to build new technologies that will change the world. It has captured the attention of the public, government, and industrial corporations. How it will influence our lives will depend on how we prepare ourselves and our successors. Here we present a brief outline of our effort of education, research and training being taken trans-disciplinarily at Osaka University since 2004, in order to prepare our future scientists, engineers, and industrial leaders in the rapidly flourishing fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology.

We describe a strategy to efficiently introduce concepts of scanning force microscopy in introductory science and engineering classes. Particular emphasis is placed in qualitative understanding via intuition building with numerical trial and error. In addition, model development is introduced and used to perform quantitative predictions of force-separation curves.

The Women in Materials (WIM) program, supported by the National Science Foundation, is a collaboration between Simmons College, a predominately undergraduate women’s college, and the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR). For the past four years, this program has provided unusual curricular and research opportunities for undergraduate women at Simmons College. This program demonstrates a successful model for enhancing undergraduate science and technology preparation through collaboration between primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) and NSF-supported Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers.

The establishment, in 2000 and 2003, of new degree programs in Photovoltaics and Solar Energy Engineering and Renewable Energy Engineering at the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney was in response to predictions, now being fulfilled, of dramatic global market and employment growth. They were developed by the well established photovoltaics research group at UNSW that has produced many important advances, including two commercially important solar cell technologies. Materials-related education in these programs are mainly focussed on the photovoltaic aspects, including study of the fundamental optical, electronic, phononic and excitonic properties of silicon, crystal structure, semiconductor properties, doping and contacts. Cell manufacturing is taught in detail, including by the use of an interactive virtual production line. Practical projects, taking advantage of a large and active research group, are one of the most important and effective educational tools in both these programs. The Centre also administers postgraduate coursework and research programs.

The authors have developed, implemented and assessed an on-line, open-book quizzing environment for the introductory materials science course, “Materials In Today’s World”. The course is offered as an E-Education course and students may complete the course from anywhere that permits access to our course management system, ANGEL. For reasons that were both pragmatic and philosophical, we decided that the exams/quizzes would not be proctored, they would be delivered wholly on-line, and would be open-book.

In the current paper, we will present and justify our philosophy, of on-line, open-book quizzes: the rich feedback, which is a feature or our quizzing system, QuestionMark Perception, is used both as a teaching tool, and as a means to refine the quiz database. We have replaced the original “high-stakes” midterm and final exam, with a series of lower-stakes, weekly quizzes, which are generated from a large question database. Student response to the quizzing environment is generally very positive.

The use of exhibits in informal science education venues such as science centers and museums is an integral part of engaging students in science, encouraging them to take science courses in school, and motivating them to pursue science and engineering careers. Through an Internships in Public Science Education Program funded by the National Science Foundation and in partnership with the education efforts of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and the Discovery World Museum of Science, Economics and Technology, we have built and tested interactive components for museum exhibits on advanced materials science and nanotechnology concepts. Our front-end assessment revealed a gap in scientific understanding about objects smaller than can be seen by the naked eye. Facts learned through standard teaching methods were easily recalled, but in-depth, conceptual knowledge and application of those facts are lacking in both children and adults. We designed interactive exhibits to specifically address this disconnect in comprehension. By inviting the learner to actively participate in an interactive exhibit activity, he or she is able to develop a deeper understanding of advanced materials concepts that are difficult to teach with textbooks alone. Formative assessment of our exhibit prototypes show that students and adults not only participate in the interactive exhibit activity, but are able to learn and apply the concepts contained within them.

The National Science Foundation created the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) in order to establish a technical, communal, and organizational framework for access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. As part of the NSDL, the Materials Digital Library (MatDL) Pathway focuses specifically on serving the materials science (MS) community with a target audience that includes MS undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and researchers. MatDL is a collaborative effort involving the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Kent State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Iowa State University, and Purdue University. Our network of collaborations also includes a Nanoscience Interdisciplinary Research Team, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and International Materials Institute. A primary goal of MatDL is to bring materials science research and education closer together. MatDL provides innovative uses of digital libraries and the web as educational media in the MS community with particular emphasis on providing: 1) tools to describe, manage, exchange, archive, and disseminate scientific data 2) workspace for open access development of modeling and simulation tools 3) services and content for virtual labs in large undergraduate introductory science courses, and 4) workspace for collaborative development of core undergraduate MS teaching resources for emerging areas. This paper will provide an overview of the NSDL MatDL Pathway, details about specific aspects of the project, as well as interactions between research and education.

There would appear to be a large disconnect between the content of a typical high school chemistry course, and an introductory, college materials science course. For example, A National Science Foundation report notes that,

“the historic bias of chemistry curricula towards small molecule chemistry, generally in the gaseous and liquid states, is out of touch with current opportunities for chemists in research, education and technology”.

In contrast, the typical introductory college materials science course concentrates almost exclusively on the solid state, and a discussion of “small molecular” materials is virtually absent.

In the present contribution, it will be shown how the “molecule” forms part of a hierarchical series of structures, from the sub-atomic to the macroscopic. It will also be argued that the molecule is but a sub-set of a localized grouping of atoms, which is best described by the term “monomer”.

Based on a strict definition of the molecule and monomer, a complete hierarchical scheme for the structure of materials is developed, which should be applicable to both a high school chemistry course, and an introductory materials science course.

This project was initiated with an undergraduate student’s exploration of two advanced research tools: the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and the atomic force microscope(AFM). A research project was developed to study the application of microscopy to introductory physics instruction. Nine modules covering various aspects of introductory physics were created. Module components included discussions, laboratory experiments and assessments. Four of the nine modules were implemented in various high school classes. Assessments were used to compare student learning with the modules versus standard textbook/lecture techniques. Preliminary results of this study are presented along with recently developed methods created to facilitate implementation of these modules within the high school classroom.

Crystallographic databases for inorganic materials that are freely accessible over the internet are reviewed. The Nano-Crystallography Database project is described. Instructions are given on how to visualize in three dimensions the atomic arrangements of the several thousand entries of the Crystallography Open Database.

Over the last twenty years, NSF and the engineering community have called for systemic changes in engineering education, including an emphasis on contextual understanding; increased teaming skills, including collaborative, active learning; and an improved capacity for life-long, self-directed learning. In addition, ABET has called for engineering graduates that demonstrate an ability to apply science and engineering, and ABET requires assessment processes designed to measure student achievement of learning outcomes. Olin College has responded to these calls for change by embracing new learning approaches and assessment techniques, and by developing project-based courses that encourage experiential understanding of content and aid the development of life-long learning skills. To address the assessment needs of new pedagogical approaches, Olin recently instituted a competency based assessment system to accompany the traditional course grading system already in place. The thread of competency assessments provides grading coherency for both faculty and students, and it provides students with valuable information concerning their development of nontraditional skills that they could use to identify shortcomings and further their learning. In this paper, we describe the new pedagogical approaches in Olin's introductory materials science course, and we explain our implementation of the competency assessment system to measure student attainment of both materials science knowledge and broader skills such as teaming, communication, and experimental inquiry.