High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales was launched in 2010 as a five year joint venture between Wales’ six Universities, working in partnership with a variety of academic and industrial stakeholders and funded by the EU, UK and Welsh Governments. The aim of HPC Wales is to deliver a pan-Wales HPC infrastructure: primarily to assist with economic regeneration in the Principality of Wales (which has a population of approximately 3.6 million) through the up-skilling of individuals and by promoting uptake of HPC in Welsh businesses, but also open to collaborations from outside Wales. It is the first national service of its kind in Europe.

In order to encourage the uptake of HPC into small and medium sized enterprises (of up to 250 staff) in Wales, and for HPC Wales itself to become a sustainable business, the development of a strong skills base is vital. Successful delivery will be marked by the successful upskilling of individuals via accredited training programmes, and through outreach and engagement activities. Recognising that a significant amount of upskilling is required, further work is being undertaken by HPC Wales to develop workflows which can help to simplify the HPC job submission process for the end user. This will make it possible for businesses to achieve results without their needing to acquire a high level of specialist HPC skills in the short term.

At a mid-point in this ambitious venture, this paper examines the strategies being developed by HPC Wales which will help to ensure propagation throughout the educational chain so that the requisite skills and workflows are in place which will benefit the next-generation workforce. Through this, HPC Wales hopes to assist in the overall advancement of scientific discovery which will, in turn, help Welsh businesses to become more competitive in the global marketplace.

James Madison University (JMU) faculty and K-12 teachers founded in 2011 the Shenandoah Valley Nanoscience Outreach Collaboration (SVNOC) effort. The goal of SNVOC is to help K-12 teachers incorporate nanoscience concepts into their classrooms. In this work we present how SVNOC participants use the Nanodays experimental kits to help students understand basic nanotechnology principles such as “How small is small?” Our preliminary results show that for PE the best experiments are the ones that are outside the operating schema of kids so they can stimulate further research. At the HS level, there is a consensus that students need more challenging mathematics that can be extracted from these experimental kits.

In-depth materials science course offerings are crucial for training the next generation of researchers in many pure and applied fields. However, translating discoveries from the laboratory into domestic and industrial settings requires contributions from professionals outside of these strictly technical areas. Providing non-major students instruction in core scientific ideas and illustrating the myriad pathways by which these ideas become innovative technologies should be an additional goal of science and engineering programs. “Technologies of the Future” (ToF) is a novel course for non-science/engineering majors in which students participate in team-based laboratory and design projects with modern materials systems. After learning about a phenomenon or physical principle in class, students are given the opportunity to explore it in lab and are tasked with the design of a novel device that incorporates it. Example laboratory topics include superhydrophobic surfaces and dye-sensitized solar cells. In the design phase, instructors act as “consultants”, lending their expertise to students unfamiliar with engineering analysis or ancillary physical concepts. Summative activities are designed to leverage the diverse talents of the interdisciplinary teams of students. The course concepts and activities are designed to prepare students for both a modern workplace that requires innovative thinking and a modern world in which emerging technologies offer solutions to pressing environmental and social problems.

In this paper, we present a work plan for the dissemination of refreshable, photoactuatable tactile displays to the visually impaired, serving both Lab-to-Market and Lab-to-Classroom initiatives. The work plan is designed in accordance with the logic model, which identifies an overlap amongst classroom, market, and laboratory. This overlap seems to nucleate when a technology in developmental phase is deployed in a classroom with high affinity to such technology. In this scheme, students are stakeholders whom help decide both content and applications to be included in the developing curriculum, and provide technology feedback, effectively leading to increased consumer acceptance. The identified Lab-to-Market-to-Classroom continuum could be the missing link where to nurture sustainable scientific, technological, and curricular development.

Hitachi High Technologies is On the Frontlines of Science Education Outreach Programs. Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation (Hitachi High-Tech), a global leader in the electron microscope industry, is working to inspire a new generation of achievement in science education. In loaning out its tabletop microscopes Hitachi High-Tech is tackling the problem of waning interest in science education, which is becoming a global issue throughout all industrialized nations. Hitachi High-Tech aims to become the global leader in providing high-tech solutions, and its support for science extends beyond Japan to North America, South America, and Europe.

This multi-phased study investigates the learning outcomes of courses taught in the K-14 classroom. Specifically, the methods and practices teachers use to develop and encourage 21st Century Skills including critical thinking skills and technological fluency in all subject areas, STEM and non-STEM related, are of great interest. Currently, these skills are in high demand in fields which develop advanced materials and are the backbone of the National Academiesdeveloped Frameworks for K-12 Science Education. Phase I participants in this study included high school and college educators while Phase II of the study will involve K-14 students. In this study, educators were asked to rate their teaching self-efficacy in two primary areas: critical thinking skills and technological fluency. This included questions related to components in their current curriculum as well as methods of assessment [e.g., rubrics]. The instrument created to measure self-efficacy was based on a modified ‘Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument' (STEBI). All participants were from Connecticut. Results indicate that both STEM and non-STEM related subject areas offer an equally rich array of opportunities to effectively teach critical thinking and technological fluency at a variety of educational levels. The impact of Professional Development on teacher self-efficacy was of particular importance, especially in K-12 education.

In the fall of 2012 the Stanford University materials science course Solar Cells, Fuel Cells and Batteries: Materials for the Energy Solution was offered as a flipped class and a massively open online course (MOOC). To the best of our knowledge, this was the first materials science MOOC. Here we describe how the course was implemented, and present results on performance, demographics and other observations that were made. Finally, we provide some perspectives for the future of the implementation of these engineering MOOCs.

Nanotechnology and nanoscience have a strong potential to impact society and the commercial sector. It is critical to introduce this area to high school classrooms as a teaching tool. Here, we report the development of ferrofluid-based experimental modules in a team effort including a high school student and a high school teacher. The basic experimental modules were developed as follows: A) Electric motor-based patterning of magnetic nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes on a silicon wafer. Electromagnetically activated or ‘spiked’-ferrofluid was utilized here. B) Basic concepts of wettability, hydrophobicity, and oleophilicity were demonstrated by combining hydrophobic CNTs, water, and ferrofluids. C) Finally, the utility of ferrofluid-based environmental remediation was demonstrated for oil removal from oil-water mixture and organic dye separation from water-dye mixture. It is envisioned that the integration of the developed experimental modules into high school curriculum will motivate high school students to pursue degrees in science, engineering, and nanotechnology. Thus, this will assist in the development of future workforce in the area of nanotechnology and materials science.

It has been noted by various reports that during recent years, there has been an alarming decline in young people’s interest for science studies and mathematics. Since it is believed that the traditional teaching methods often fail to foster positive attitudes towards learning science, the European Commission has made intensive efforts to promote science education in schools though new methods based on the inquiry based techniques: questions, search and answers. This is coupled to hands-on experience, playful learning accompanied by laboratory exercises and examples.

“Discover the COSMOS” is such a project which brings into synergy resources from high energy, astronomy and space physics to promote e-Science in Europe. Event analysis tools from the ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN -such as the “hunt for the Higgs” application- as well as time slices in various robotic telescopes around the world and the related software to process the images, are all available as educational scenaria for both the students and the educators. Moreover, the best practices are presented in a more theoretical for the teachers in the “Pathway” project. Examples of the available resources as well as first results from the evaluation of the programs are presented.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a dynamic and on-going educational outreach program designed to support middle school science teachers and increase their understanding of the science they teach with applications to the real world and connections to the latest NIST research. In the NIST Summer Institute for Middle School Science Teachers, science topics are taken from NIST research pertinent to the middle school curriculum, and the research is translated for use in the classroom. During the two-week summer program teachers from around the country are given the opportunity to focus on NIST research as it relates to the middle school classroom by participating in a combination of hands-on activities, lectures, tours, and visits with scientists and engineers in their laboratories. The NIST Summer Institute is designed to increase teacher understanding of the subjects they teach, provide inquiry activities for the classroom, rekindle teachers’ enthusiasm for science, provide increased understanding of how scientific research is performed, create a learning community of teachers and scientists, and provide role models for the teachers. Teachers finish the NIST Summer Institute with a wealth of knowledge about core topics in introductory biology, chemistry, physics, and materials to integrate these topics into their existing curriculum.

The NIST Summer Institute has spawned additional related outreach activities, including “Science Afternoons at NIST,” in which teachers are invited back to NIST during the school year for events in which the focus is on a single topic such as designing buildings to resist earthquakes, infrared energy, and nanomagnetism. Based on continued requests from participants in the NIST Summer Institute, an additional program, the NIST Research Experience for Teachers program, was begun in 2011 with teachers performing research at NIST under the guidance of NIST scientists and engineers, and designing ways to take their research experience back into the classroom to share with their students. This proceeding will give examples of topics covered and activities developed in past Summer Institutes, as well as ways similar Institutes are being implemented at other locations. While not a teaching institution but a research institute focused on meeting the measurement science needs of the nation, NIST has a wealth of resources for the education community. The NIST Summer Institute for Middle School Science Teachers is one way of sharing these resources and building partnerships between middle school science teachers and their students and NIST scientists and engineers.

We describe an experiment designed as an upper level physics laboratory that introduces students to Raman Scattering of electronic materials and research methodology. This experiment is an effective approach in demonstrating the relationship between the Raman intensity of the scattered light from crystals and symmetry dependent Raman selection rules. In our measurements we alter the angle between the crystal axis and the polarization of the incident laser beam by Si (100) sample rotation. The three dimensional plot of the intensity profile versus the theoretical model is used to distinguish differences between various crystal planes of the same electronic sample. This experiment will combine optical analysis with materials aspects of electronic materials.