Education Exchange
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General Atomics Enhances Pre-College Science Education General Atomics (GA) is committed to playing a major role in enhancing precollege science education in the San Diego area as well as for the nation. The program includes "hands-on" teaching units to provide an innovative and interesting format for the teaching of scientific concepts as well as other activities designed to bring the industrial research experience into the classroom. The GA education outreach program originated from a desire on the part of the CEO of GA, Neal Blue, his wife Anne Blue, and Patricia Winter, GA's education outreach coordinator, to initiate a program to enrich K-12 science education in the San Diego area. This was inspired by a similar successful program that Anne and Patricia started in biology at the neighboring Salk Institute. GA's education outreach coordinator, senior management, and science administrators from the San Diego area brought together teams of GA scientists and junior and senior high school science teachers from San Diego County to formulate hands-on teaching units. The teams consisted of at least four scientists and four teachers. Over the course of a year, they developed five teaching modules based on active areas of research at GA: An Exploration of Materials Science, Radioactivity in the Environment, Energy from the Atom, Fusion, and Recombinant DNA. These workshops have been presented to over 300 teacher attendees from junior and senior high schools in the local area. Recently, the materials science module was presented to teachers in Orange County, California, and it was also presented as part of an American Chemical Society nationwide satellite television seminar for science teachers. The teaching module for the Exploration of Materials Science was developed because this science field is not generally taught at the pre-college level, and its multidisciplinary nature allows it to be taught as part of physics, chemistry, or biology classes. The module includes elements of chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, and the use of computers. The teaching module enables students to produce, study, characterize, and compare different classes of materials: metals, ceramics, and polymers. The students begin by fabricating test bars of materials characteristics from each of the three general classes. Tin was selected for the metal because of its ready availability, low melting temperature, and nontoxic nature. Test bars are fabricated by melting tin on a hot
plate and casting it into a graphite mold. An anchor cement was selected as the ceramic to allow the use of a roomtemperature cure. The samples are cast into a plastic mold using a mold release. A one-part ultraviolet-curable polyester resin was selected for the representative polymer material because of its simplicity, ease of curing, and relative nontoxicity. The polymer samples are made by casting them into a mold with a release agent and curing them for a few minutes in direct sunlight. The students characterize the properties of each of the materials by no
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