Nanotechnology into the Chemistry

Nanotechnology can provide exciting exampleslike invisibility cloaks and gecko inspired climbing gloves to inspire students. And nanotechnology is already impacting an array of industry sectors such as consumer electronics, textiles, aerospace and automotive,biotechnology and medicine. And, now I’d like to turn it over to my colleague Quinn Spadola who will be your host this evening. Quinn Hi Lisa, thank you very much. Thank you everyone for joining us this evening. Before we get started with the webinar I want to point out a couple of things happening here at the NNCO. Lisa just mentioned teaching nano in an emerging technology network. If you're interested you can follow that link to learn more or email us at the bottom at nanoed@nnco.nano.gov. Basically we want to bring you together so you can learn from each other and as a part of that network we have the teaching nano amp; emerging technology web series. They have been, we've had three previous webinars,tonight is our fourth and the last three are archived on NanoTube, the national technologyinitiative’s YouTube channel and this will be posted as well so you can certainly checkout our past webinars if you haven't already. There's also a research portal I want to point you to. There's over 400 resources on this portal that you can search by grade level, activity, et cetera. Please check it out; they're all designed to help teach nanotechnology in the classroom. And lastly I want to point out that our office provides for free, Big Things from a Tiny World which is a brochure to help introduce basic concepts to nanotechnology. You can either email or go to the webpage there to download it. So there's lots of great resources out there to help teach nanotechnology in the classroom and always feel free to email at nanoed@nnco.nano.gov. One last thing I want to mention before we get started, National Nanotechnology Day is October 9th, in honor of 10 to the minus 9th,of course. This is a community lead event to celebrate all these nanotechnology. Previous years teachers have participated by having their students run the 100 billion nanometer dash, so 100 meters. It's a great way to get your kids outside and running around and also help them realize how small the nanoscale is. If you go to that web page and you'll learn more. If you decide to participate, please let us know we like to keep track of what's going on and we'll put it on the map of the various activities that are happening around the U.S. for national nanotechnology day. And the National Science Foundation and theNNI are, for the third year, hosting Generation Nano: Superheroes Inspired by Science. This is a competition for high school students. They create science-enabled gear for an original superhero, they get to create a comic or video and the finalists are brought to the USA Science and Engineeringfestival in Washington, D.C. which is awesome. So I want to let you guys know about that as well and there's the link for that. Tonight's webinar, which is Introducing Technology Into the Chemistry Classroom. It will feature Sherri Rukes, who has been teaching for over 20 years and is the president-elect of the American Associationof Chemistry Teachers. I gotta see this presentation when she was at the National Science Teachers Association annual meeting last spring, and it was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed it and that's why I invited her to speak to all of you this evening. So Sherri, if you're ready to go, I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you, Quinn. So my name is Sherri Rukes and I am at Libertyville,high school. For the people who don’t know where Libertyvilleis, I am the same distance to Milwaukee, Wisconsin as downtown Chicago. So I am very close to the border of the Illinois-Wisconsinline. So I'm here to talk about what I do in mychemistry classroom to introduce nanotechnology. And the first thing I'm going to ask is if you look at these two pictures, how are they similar? For my students when I show them these pictures,they first go, there's nothing similar about them. There's medieval times, it's unsanitary with the medieval picture, they're glass blowing, they're constructing. And then on the other side they're like, it's a clean room. It has high priced scientific equipment, ithas people doing research, those are the scientists. And then I tell them, they're both nano scientists. That they are both using nanotechnology. One may not know it, while the other one is truly trying to advance our science endeavors by nanotechnology. And so these little intriguing pictures, and ideas I bring up in my classroom, is how I get kids excited and start thinking about those areas. So the first question is, what exactly is nano. It's basically all around us. If you look, my students, I try to introduce pop culture everywhere. And they read books, they watch movies. And back in 2002, Willem Dafoe was actually a nanotechnologist in the Spiderman movie. Then in one version of the incredible Hulk You had him being created due to nanotechnology. Those were in the 2000s. Way back in 1966 you had Fantastic Voyage,where they talked about having these machines that go into the body to try to help us out. Back then that was amazing. That was futuristic. Now, in 2005, GE actually had a commercial showing the same type of idea. And in fact later on CNN interviewed an inventor who came up with nanobots that would go inside the body and try to repair bones or repair things to help us out. So what used to be futuristic is really coming to life. And even in books, Michael Crichton talks about this autonomous gray goo that self-replicates. Another form of nanotechnology. So by the definition, nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems on a molecular scale. It is the intertwining of the sciences. Because the physics, the chemistry, the biology at the nanotechnology level is different and unique, and we could help each part, each department out and further their discoveries. If you look at nanoscience, that is just the study of atoms, molecules, at that nanoscale level. So why is it a big deal? Once again we see these images. I'm sorry I couldn't show you the true IBMpicture I wanted to that IBM put out in magazines and on TV. They were able to manipulate atoms and write out IBM. And NIST did the same thing. All of these going to that atomic level will change the properties and give us fascinating new items. So one of the easiest things you could doin your classroom is just make sure you talk about the nanometer when you talk about the metric system. So how big really is a nanometer? Well, if you look at a bike, a bike is about a meter in length. Then if you look at the original iPhone, that's about a 10th of a meter. You have then a ladybug that is a 100th of a meter, and a grain of sand which is 1/1000 of a meter. These are all visible to the naked eye. We can see these things. When you go even smaller, for instance, the picture of the frog red cells, those are about 6-8 micrometers. 1/1 millionth of a meter. A human hair is about 17 to 181 micrometers. If you go even smaller you get viruses that are 3-50 nanometers, atoms that are less than a nanometer. In chemistry class we talk about the allotropes of carbon, we talk about the Buckyball and nanotubes. All of those are approximately 1 nanometer in width or length. DNA is 2.5nanometer.