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Project Description
Our project will involve developing software for Nancy Nowak's after-school science program. She would like
to teach the kids about materials science. Brian Sheldon and Janet Rankin, two Brown engineering professors,
are involved in this collaboration as well. They will provide us with the scientific and mathematical background
we need to develop the program.
Audience
While our current audience is Nancy Nowak's class, Janet and Brian run
workshops to teach Providence area
school teachers how to integrate materials science into their curriculum. Thus, it is very possible that other
local schools will use this program. In addition, Brown is one of twenty Materials Science Research Centers
in the United States, which are dedicated to this kind of University-community collaboration. So, our program
may have wider distribution as well.
System Capabilities
The computer that Nancy is running in her classroom is a PC with a Pentium
III processor, 9GB free hard drive
space, a CD-ROM drive, and 64 MB of RAM. We are not too worried that her system will be able to handle our
program. However, we would still like to make the program accessible to other classrooms who may not have such
a high-end system.
Program
We are planning on developing a program that will allow students to build a
diving board and see how the materials the student chose affect the behavior of the diving board. We will
have numerous materials available for students to choose from. We will also allow the students to change
the place of the fulcrum, the length of the board, the weight of the person diving, and the environment.
Some varying environments would be on the moon (different gravity) or in places of varying temperature (to
examine the effects on stiffness, etc). Nancy told us that the students have trouble understanding the
concept of variables, so we would like to help the students in this area. We are thinking that it would
be beneficial for there to be a teacher control that would allow her to design a setup that the kids would
have to work from. For example, one day, everyone would have to build the best diving board on the moon.
In order to increase student understanding of the concepts and not just guess
and play around, we would like to ask the student to predict the behavior of the board before they start
the simulation. Then they would awarded points based on a particular parameter (such as how high they
jumped) as well as whether their hypothesis was correct. Their scores would be saved because each student
will have an account with their best designs and scores. We would also like to allow students to play
against each other in design contests, or with each other in teams. Most students liked the idea of
working in pairs, but hopefully we can make it so students can work in a variety of situations.
We would also like the students to be able to click on the material they
are using to see the microstructure. A possibility would be to ask the students to describe how the
microstructure of the best material differed from that of the worst material. This could then be stored
in a file for the teacher to access to gauge student progress. In the teacher mode, we would also like
to give the teacher the ability to see all the student user names and passwords so that if a student
forgot theirs, she could help them out.
Tools to Create the Program
For an authoring tool, we are looking for something that would allow
animation and graphical capabilities. However, we also need it to do mathematical equations in order
to calculate how the
spring constants, etc effect the animation and/or graphics. We would also like to allow the teacher to have
seperate screens that show her summary information. As we haven't really explored any of the tools
available except for Java, we are still undecided on this front.
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