From Soda Cans to Smart Phones - How It's Made

For my last honors experience, I was excited to get another chance to overlap my journey in the UHP with my academics and knowledge base that I have gained in engineering. In the aerospace industry, a baseline understanding of materials sciences is incredibly important to have no matter what type of position you end up in. I can almost guarantee that any engineer in aerospace will have to consider material properties in their job, even if their position is not dedicated to materials. Taking this course was a fun way to get a little further into the study of materials, which I would not have gotten otherwise in my curriculum.

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Aside from the content of the lectures in this course, we also got the opportunity to share our learnings with students for the final project in the course. Splitting our class into groups, we each got to focus on a particular class of materials and put together a lecture and activity of our own to carry out with a group of middle and high school kids from the surrounding community. This was a great experience both in the sense that it challenged us to have an even deeper understanding of the content itself, but also to learn how to share that information in a manner that would be able to transcend the different ages and backgrounds of all of the students present. Developing hands-on activities and interactive sessions for the students was not easy, but presented a super fun experience that I would not have gotten to be involved in without a class like this! Having the opportunity to do community outreach while talking about something that I am passionate about was a really impactful experience, and is something that I find myself interested in seeking out in the future.

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Below is the final lesson plan and lecture that my group and I ended up creating and presenting to the students. Our lecture began with an activity where we challenged the students to create their own composite material before they had any information on what exactly that would entail. We explained that it would be a competition to see who could create the strongest material out of the different crafting supplies that they were given. Then we went on to explain to the students what they had created, and we strived to make sure that we were as interactive as possible, asking the students questions throughout and encouraging them to participate. At the end of the presentation we played a Jeopardy! game that we made in order to "test" their knowledge. Lastly, we carried out a test to see which group's material was the strongest, and had the students reflect on what they would have done differently after learning about what makes composite materials so strong.

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Check out the lecture and lesson plan that my teammates and I created below, along with some photos from the event!