Cutting-Edge and Cross-Cutting: Connecting the Dots between

Sep 11, 2012 - This editorial suggests opportunities for celebrating this year's National Chemistry Week theme of nanotechnology by incorporating idea...
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Cutting-Edge and Cross-Cutting: Connecting the Dots between Nanotechnology and High School Chemistry Gregory T. Rushton*,† and Brett A. Criswell‡ †

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia 30144, United States Department of Middle-Secondary and Instructional Technology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, United States

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ABSTRACT: This editorial suggests opportunities for celebrating this year’s National Chemistry Week theme of nanotechnology by incorporating ideas from consumer products and technological materials to address two issues often faced by the precollege teaching community in their classes. First, the relevance of introductory chemistry topics to students’ lives is considered, then how cross-cutting concepts that connect chemistry to other disciplines can be facilitated through this year’s National Chemistry Week theme.

KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, Curriculum, Nanotechnology

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curriculum makes it possible to address two of the issues we both constantly faced as high school chemistry teachers: (i) making our content relevant and engaging to students; and (ii) finding ways to draw connectionsnot just between different chemistry concepts, but between concepts in chemistry and those in biology, earth science, and physics. With regards to the first issue, as was noted in the opening paragraph, the CNEU workshop was different from many professional development opportunities available to science teachers in exposing those participating to cutting-edge science. Bringing nanotechnology into the chemistry classroom can help our students move beyond what happened yesterday (or many yesterdays ago) in science, to what is happening today and what might happen tomorrow. Searching online sources such as ScienceDaily News4 or LiveScience,5 one quickly becomes aware of the almost-daily breakthroughs that are taking place in nanotechnology. And those breakthroughs can often be used in the engage or elaborate portions of a 5 E learning cycle6 to make students aware of the excitement and applicability of the content they are studying. For instance, an article that appeared in Science Daily News in July 2012, titled “Entropy Can Lead to Order, Paving the Route to Nanostructures”7 could be used to help elaborate on students’ understanding of the core concept of entropy, while at the same time letting them know how advanced materials of the future might be made. Using nanotechnology to make chemistry relevant and engaging and accessible does not have to be confined to having students passively read about the experiments being done in this field; it can also involve having them experiment in this area themselves. Several articles have been published in the

n the summer of 2004, I (Brett) had a unique experience that continues to influence my teachingof both chemistry and future chemistry educatorsto this day. I had the opportunity to participate in a weeklong workshop titled An Introduction to Nanotechnology hosted by the Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization at Penn State University (CNEU).1 The workshop was unique for me in two ways: (i) instead of learning about science that had been known for a long time, I was learning about science that was at the frontier of research; and (ii) instead of attending it by myself, I attended with a colleague (a high school physics teacher). By the time the workshop was over, I was hooked: I wanted to find every opportunity that I could to bring ideas related to nanotechnology into my classroom. I spent the next several years working with the CNEU staff to develop the curricular materials to realize that vision. This effort involved obtaining a grant from the Toshiba America Foundation,2 completing a summer educational internship at the CNEU, and working with colleaguesall in a focused effort to help as many students as possible feel the same excitement about nanotechnology as I did. Flash forward eight years and I am feeling some of the same excitement that I experienced back in the summer of 2004, because National Chemistry Week (NCW) is here and the theme this year is Nanotechnology: The Smallest BIG Idea in Science.3 To help you prepare for this week and to consider ways in which you might convey the beauty, challenges, and triumphs of this fast-developing field with your students, Greg and I wanted to share what came out of our conversation about what it was that had caused me to get “hooked” on nanotechnology. Through that discussion, we realized that infusing nanotechnology examples and ideas into the © 2012 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.

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Journal that describe investigations in which students either prepare or study the properties of gold,8 silver,9 and iron oxide10 nanoparticles. Another article introduces students to the principle of nanoencapsulation, while at the same time allowing them to explore the concept of weak and strong acids and bases.11 Science supply companies have begun to support teaching these ideas by developing inexpensive kits based on these investigations.12 In this month’s (October 2012) issue of the Journal, there are several other articles that discuss the preparation and characterization of nanomaterials that suggest other ideas about how to incorporate nanochemistry ideas in your curriculum.8,13−16 When considering how to connect the teaching of nanotechnology in precollege classrooms to other disciplines, it is understandable to view it as something else to add to the laundry list of concepts that you are expected to cover in the curriculumperhaps an impediment to the coverage of the content that your students will be tested upon. Within all of our science courses, however, there are common themes (Benchmarks for Science Literacy),17 unifying concepts (National Science Education Standards),18 or cross-cutting concepts (A Framework for K−12 Science Education)19whatever label you want to apply to themthat enable us to support our students in learning more science while we teach less material because broader and deeper knowledge structures can be built off of these foundational principles. A curriculum infused with ideas and activities related to nanotechnology can allow you to explore these cross-cutting concepts in innovative and meaningful ways. Take for instance the notion of scale, proportion, and quantity, a cross-cutting concept in the new frameworks.19 It is well established that chemistry students struggle with the transition from the macroscopic to the microscopic and the translation back and forth between the two realms.20 That transition can be made more accessible by stopping at the nanoscale for a little while on the journey from the visible to the particulate to truly think about what new understandings can be obtained by looking at phenomena at a different scale. Discussions could be started about why it is that nanoparticles of wax create a more even coating on our cars or why nanoparticles of zinc oxide produce a clear sunscreen as opposed to an unappealing milky white suspension.21 We could also connect our content with that of our colleagues teaching biology11 (or physics or earth science) with a conversation about micro- versus nanoencapsulation. (See Figure 1.) One of the advantages of nanoencapsulated drugs (as opposed to microencapsulated versions) is that these formulations contain active ingredients that are of the same size scale as the biological entities the drugs are targeting: viruses.22 Because biology teachers focus on examining the relationship between the Framework’s structure and function, we could give significant attention to the relationship between structure and properties. We could make explicit the link between biology’s overarching concern with structure and function and chemistry’s frequent consideration of structure and properties using nanotechnology examples that students encounter outside of school. Biology teachers might talk about how the function of proteins might be controlled through nanotechnology22 and chemistry teachers might examine how the properties of graphene might make it ideal for creating digital transistors. Moreover, for chemistry teachers, ideas from nanotechnology could provide a way to introduce their students to unique ways in which the concepts of scale (size), structure, and properties intersect. For instance, gold is

Figure 1. Sequences mimicking the process of nanoencapsulation that students initiate in an activity using an antacid formulation. Adapted from the Supporting Information of the article “Connecting Acids and Bases with Encapsulation...and Chemistry with Nanotechnology”; see ref 11.

gold colored at a macroscopic scale; at the nanoscale, gold can be various colors, depending on the size of the particles.8 As one source has suggested, advances in nanotechnology can be “likened to an expansion of the entire periodic table of the elements into another dimension”.23 We hope you will be able to include this year’s NCW theme in your classroom in productive and meaningful ways for your students this year. For additional resources, visit JCE’s thematic collection of nano-related articles for NCW 2012.24 Your feedback and experiences are valuable; we hope you will share them with us by leaving a comment at Greg’s blog post25 at the JCE Chemical Education Xchange Web site.

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AUTHOR INFORMATION

Corresponding Author

*E-mail: [email protected]. Notes

Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.

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REFERENCES

(1) Center for Nanotechnology Education and Utilization Web page. http://www.cneu.psu.edu/ (accessed Aug 2012). (2) Toshiba America Foundation Web page. http://www.toshiba. com/taf/ (accessed Aug 2012).

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(3) American Chemical Society National Chemistry Week 2012 Web page. http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_ pageLabel=PP_TRANSITIONMAIN&node_id=1033&use_sec= false&sec_url_var=region1 (accessed Aug 2012). (4) Science Daily News Web page. http://www.sciencedaily.com/ (accessed Aug 2012). (5) LiveScience Web page. http://www.livescience.com/ (accessed Aug 2012). (6) Thier, H.; Karplus, R.; Lawson, C.; Knoll, R.; Montgomery, M. Science Curriculum Improvement Study; Rand McNally: Chicago, IL, 1970. (7) University of Michigan. Entropy Can Lead to Order, Paving the Route to Nanostructures. ScienceDaily, 26 July 2012. http://www. sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120726142200.htm (accessed Aug 2012). (8) Sharma, R. K.; Gulati, S.; Mehta, S. Preparation of Gold Nanoparticles Using Tea: A Green Chemistry Experiment. J. Chem. Educ. 2012; DOI: 10.1021/ed2002175. (9) Solomon, S. D.; Bahadory, M.; Jeyarajasingam, A. V.; Rutkowsky, S. A.; Boritz, C.; Mulfinger, L. Synthesis and Study of Silver Nanoparticles. J. Chem. Educ. 2007, 84, 322−325. (10) Van Dorn, D.; Ravalli, M. T.; Small, M. M.; Hillery, B.; Andreescu, S. Adsorption of Arsenic by Iron Oxide Nanoparticles: A Versatile, Inquiry-Based Laboratory for a High School or College Science Course. J. Chem. Educ. 2011, 88, 1119−1122. (11) Criswell, B. Connecting Acids and Bases with Encapsulation...and Chemistry with Nanotechnology. J. Chem. Educ. 2007, 84, 1136−1139. (12) For instance, Flinn Scientific, at http://www.flinnsci.com/ (accessed Aug 2012), sells kits for preparing and studying gold (RubyRed Colloidal Gold Nanotechnology Demonstration Kit; AP 7117; $;31.65) and silver (“Golden” Silver Nanoparticles; AP 7483; $;19.15) nanoparticles. Additionally, they sell a kit based on the microencapsulation article (Modeling NanotechnologyEncapsulation by Sodium Alginate; AP 7361; $;30.05). (13) Campbell, D. J.; Villarreal, R. B.; Fitzjarrald, T. J. Take-Home Nanochemistry: Fabrication of a Gold- or Silver-Containing Window Cling. J. Chem. Educ. 2012; DOI: 10.1021/ed200466k. (14) Campbell, D. J.; Andrews, M. J.; Stevenson, K. J. New Nanotech from an Ancient Material: Chemistry Demonstrations Involving Carbon-Based Soot. J. Chem. Educ. 2012; DOI: 10.1021/ed300087t. (15) Zhang, R.; Liu, S.; Yuan, H.; Xiao, D.; Choi, M. M. F. Nanosized TiO2 for Photocatalytic Water Splitting Studied by Oxygen Sensor and Data Logger. J. Chem. Educ. 2012; DOI: 10.1021/ed1009283. (16) Journal of Nano Education Home Page. http://www.aspbs.com/ jne/ (accessed Aug 2012). (17) American Association for the Advancement of Science. Benchmarks for Science Literacy; Oxford University Press: New York, 1993. (18) National Research Council. National Science Education Standards; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 1996. (19) National Research Council. A Framework for K−12 Science Education; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2012. (20) Russell, J. W.; Kozma, R. B.; Jones, T.; Wykoff, J.; Marx, N.; Davis, J. Use of Simultaneous-Synchronized Macroscopic, Microscopic, and Symbolic Representations To Enhance the Teaching and Learning of Chemical Concepts. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 330−334. (21) Dunnivant, F. M. An Integrated Limnology, Microbiology, and Chemistry Exercise for Teaching Summer Lake Stratification, Nutrient Consumption, and Chemical Thermodynamics. Am. Biol. Teach. 2006, 68, 424−427. (22) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Controlling Protein Function with Nanotechnology. ScienceDaily, 22 February 2012. http://www. sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120222154635.htm (accessed Aug 2012). (23) Drexler, K. E. The Nanotechnology Age Web Page. http:// www.thenanoage.com/ (accessed Aug 2012). (24) ACS Virtual Collections (Scroll down for the J. Chem. Educ.). http://pubs.acs.org/page/pr/thematic.html (accessed Aug 2012).

(25) JCE Chemical Education Xchange Home Page. http://www. chemedx.org/blog/cutting-edge-and-cross-cutting-connecting-dotsbetween-nanotechnology-and-high-school-chemistry (accessed Aug 2012).

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