2011 North American Materials Education Symposium
Poster Session: "Enhancing Teaching and Learning"
| Contributor | Title (click to read abstract) |
| J. Nychka
Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering University of Alberta, Canada |
Room with AVUE: Fours steps for increasing student engagement |
| Z. H. Barber, N. A. Rutter and T. W. Clyne Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, UK |
Dissemination of Information Technology for the Promotion of Materials Science (DoITPoMS): a valuable resource for teaching and learning |
| S. Seung Kim Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology/Packaging Science College of Applied Science and Technology Rochester Institute of Technology |
Transforming the Curriculum for "Green Plastics Manufacturing Technology" (GPMT) |
| T. Goette and T. Goldbeck-Wood Technische Universität, Berlin / Granta Design, UK |
The NEU Materials Database Project |
| C. Bream, N.Ball, C. Cesaretto Granta Design, UK |
MANUDIRECT – An Example of Granta's Collaboration with Industry and Academia |
| S. Caslli, E. Lamani and D. Elezi Department Production & Management, Mechanical Engineering Faculty, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania |
Integration of Eco-Design in Computer Aided Selection, an Innovative Approach for Structural Applications |
S. Egan |
The Human Biological Materials Database |
| LM. Bartolo, SC. Glotzer; DR. Sadoway; J A. Warren; MJM. Krane; AC. Powell IV; K Rajan; D Geraci; VK. Tewary; CS. Lowe Center for Materials Informatics, College of Arts and Sciences, Kent State University Kent, OH |
MatDL Pathway: Collaborative Community-based Efforts for Research & Education |
| H. Melia, M. Fry & M. Hsieh Granta Design, UK |
Granta Design's Teaching Resource Website |
| J. O'Hare and M. Hsieh Granta Design, UK |
Enabling Eco Design and Responding to Environmental Regulations |
| N. Rahbar Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA |
Bioinspired Design |
| T. Bullough (1,2), P. Goodhew (1,2), A. Mannis (2) and A. Green (3) 1. Centre for Materials and Structures, School of Engineering, University of Liverpool, UK 2. UK Centre for Materials Education 3. MATTER |
Open Educational Resources for the Materials Teaching Community (Core-materials) |
Poster Abstracts
Room with AVUE:
Fours steps for increasing student engagement
J. Nychka
Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering
University of Alberta, Canada
As an educator I have often wondered how to present materials science and engineering concepts in a simple and effective manner so to achieve long lasting student learning. My pedagogical system entitled “Room with A VUE” will be discussed, which aims to convey information in an Accessible, Visual, Unexpected, and Engaging manner. The components of the system will be described and a few case studies examined to show how the system is applied in a pedagogical manner. The system has been very successful in a diverse audience in terms of their academic discipline and learning style. The system does focus on the visualization of concepts in order to meet engineering students where they learn; engineering students are highly visual learners and they need visual stimulation. The “Room with a AVUE” system can be extended to almost any teaching environment (e.g., a student in the classroom, office, laboratory, or even in a public venue such as a classroom visit or online tutorial).
Dissemination of Information Technology for the Promotion of Materials Science (DoITPoMS): a valuable resource for teaching and learning
Z. H. Barber, N. A. Rutter and T. W. Clyne
Materials Science & Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, UK
The DoITPoMS web site (www.doitpoms.ac.uk/ ), developed in Cambridge over the last decade, has become a widely used and respected source for teaching and learning of Materials Science, on a global scale. Stand-alone Teaching & Learning Packages (TLPs) introduce concepts from a basic level, suitable for any scientist, and build on these to provide advanced level coverage of many materials-based topics. These TLPs, of which there are currently over 60, exploit interactivity through animations and simulations, video clips, questions (& model answers), and links to other resources. All elements of these packages can be separately downloaded, and used in creating customized educational resources. A Micrograph Library, containing about 1,000 images, each with associated metadata, provides further support for taught courses and those interested in material microstructures. A library of materials science related videos is also available and, as with other DoITPoMS content, contributions are invited from those with appropriate material.
Users can offer feedback, which has contributed to development of the site, and ensured continuous improvement. Tight control of content and a uniform format, with immediately recognizable appearance and attributes, makes navigation and usage easy. DoITPoMS has become a familiar and recognizable brand, and is now very widely used around the world, with over 600 institutions in 60 countries currently being established and frequent users. This poster will provide information about this resource, its widespread usage, and its continued development.
Transforming the Curriculum for "Green Plastics Manufacturing Technology" (GPMT)
S. Seung Kim
Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering Technology/Packaging Science
College of Applied Science and Technology
Rochester Institute of Technology
One of the most important subjects in any engineering technology program is manufacturing. Manufacturing involves a complex system of materials, machines and people. Most subjects of the curriculum in manufacturing focus on teaching the fundamentals of current materials (i.e., metals, ceramics, composites, and petroleum based plastics) and processes; however, few prepare students to work with a broad range of new/future materials, particularly green materials (such as, green nano-materials, biodegradable polymers, and eco friendly-hybrid materials) in advanced manufacturing technology. Further, the current approach to teaching materials technology does not appeal to students studying new manufacturing processes and systems for "Green Plastics Manufacturing Technology" (GPMT).
A multidisciplinary field, plastics manufacturing technology deals with product design, prototyping and modeling, production and process design, materials testing and characterization, process automation and robotics, and quality control. "Green Plastics Manufacturing Technology" (GPMT) is an emerging discipline that encompasses a range of activities, from the research and development of non-toxic, eco-friendly materials to the reduction of waste and pollution through changing patterns of production and consumption.
The primary goal of the project is to transform the exiting materials and manufacturing curriculum to keep pace with the new green technologies in the manufacturing and mechanical engineering technology/packaging science programs at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). We will develop and pilot test an educational approach and undergraduate teaching modules for Green Plastics Manufacturing Technology within foundational courses in the materials and manufacturing education. The outcomes of the project will bring innovation and changes, not only in terms of creating an effective instructional model for STEM education, but also by encouraging undergraduate students to do research as they prepare for careers in green plastics manufacturing technology (GPMT).
The NEU Materials Database Project
T. Goette, T. Goldbeck-Wood
Granta Design, UK / Technische Universität, Berlin
The NEU Materials Database is an ongoing joint project of Granta Design, University of Cambridge and Technische Universität Berlin. The objective is to inspire students during their studies and motivates them to study materials further. A database was developed within the interactive teaching tool CES EduPack, focusing on New, Emerging and Unusual Materials including aerogels, biomimetics, cellular materials, nano materials and shape memory alloys. The database allows students to browse, search and select information easily, and compare material properties graphically using material property charts. Additional descriptions of Material Design and Microstructure can lead to discussions of how process technology, chemical composition and the resultant microstructure affect the materials properties.
MANUDIRECT – An Example of Granta's Collaboration with Industry and Academia
C. Bream, N.Ball, C. Cesaretto
Granta Design, UK
MANUDIRECT is a European Nanotechnologies Project funded by the European Union's Sixth Framework Program. The aim of the project is to develop a new platform for the direct manufacture of fully dense metallic components with a resolution better than 50 micrometres, based on high a productivity, high resolution, direct, one step, laser sintering process. Such technology is expected to have a broad range of micro-engineering and biomedical applications. The MANUDIRECT Consortium includes academic and industrial partners from Italy, Germany, UK, Spain, Romania, Poland, Cyprus, and Belgium with commercial participants including, Siemens, EADS Deutschland, MTU and Granta.
Granta is providing software systems that enable the consortium partners to manage all materials data generated during the project in a single, collaborative, online system. Granta is also developing software tools to model the behavior of laser-sintered nano-materials. Such tools will enable researchers to investigate new materials that may offer the desired combination of properties for their application, helping them to focus material development and characterization trials on the most promising candidates.
Integration of Eco-Design in Computer Aided Selection, an Innovative Approach for Structural Applications
S. Caslli, E. Lamani and D. Elezi
Department Production & Management, Mechanical Engineering Faculty, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania
This poster presents a methodological approach of Eco-Design that combines the selection of material and shape with the enviromental impact implemented in the CES software. The main aim of the proposed approach is to consider at the concept phase of the engineering design the environmental impact of product. The target is to choose among the vast range of materials and section shapes available with maximum performance the most ecological solution. The traditional selection process in the case of a load-bearing structure includes different stages and two of them, “screening’ and “rankining”, are developed using the Ashby method. This method considers multiple constrains and compound objectives applied to a secondary beam. Such analysis leads to the identification of four performance indexes which relative importance is evaluated by the method of weight-factors. A short list of most appropriate candidates is generated based on the total performance index and on the databases included in the CES software: different materials (steels, aluminum, wood and composites) with different cross section forms (‘T’, ‘I’, ‘L’, ‘U’, etc). This profiles list is subject to another computer aided selection performed by Eco Audit tool. The top list records are ranked according to their energy consumption or CO2 footprint in the atmosphere during lifetime-cycle.
This is one of the cases studied in the course of ‘Methods of Material & Process Selection’ by the students of Master Degree in the Faculties of Engineering of Materials and Engineering of Environmental at the Polytechnic University of Tirana.
Key words: Eco-design, material, shape, performance index, weight property, multicriterial selection.
The Human Biological Materials Database
S. Egan
Granta Design, UK
The Human Biological Materials Database is a compilation of published literature concerning the properties of the skeletal tissues of the human body. Data has been collected and analysed for the main different types of material found in each individual bone, such as compact and trabecular bone of the femur. Where possible, dependencies such as age are presented in graphical form, enabling the user to visually see how the properties are affected.
The data compilation can be used for FEA applications, to compare the properties of these materials with synthetic materials, for educational purposes and as a general reference source.
MatDL Pathway: Collaborative Community-based Efforts for Research & Education
Laura M. Bartolo, Sharon C. Glotzer; Donald R. Sadoway; James A. Warren; Matthew John M. Krane; Adam C. Powell IV; Krishna Rajan; Diane Geraci; Vinod K. Tewary; Cathy S. Lowe
Center for Materials Informatics College of Arts and Sciences Kent State University Kent, OH 44242-0001 USA
With a target audience of materials undergraduate and graduate students, educators, and researchers, MatDL Pathway (http://matdl.org) assumes stewardship of significant content and services to support the integration of materials research and education. MatDL is a consortium involving NIST, Kent State University, MIT, University of Michigan, Purdue University, and Iowa State University. Highlights of MatDL’s efforts over the past year include:
- hosting roundtables at meetings of major, international, materials professional societies such as the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) . As a result of this outreach, new educational collaborators, such as RPI and Granta, as well as research projects, such as LAMMPS administered by Sandia National Labs, have been attracted to MatDL’s Repository and Matforge workspace for collaborative development of materials modeling and simulation tools.
- contributing to the expansion of virtual labs offerings to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of economies of exchange phenomena related to dimerization and dissociation.
- collaborating with 12 university partners to expand and disseminate work on materials failure cases. By offering materials educators convenient access to relevant, shared learning resources based on research, MatDL aims to impact both teaching and learning within the materials communities.
Granta Design's Teaching Resource Website
H. Melia, M. Fry & M. Hsieh
Granta Design, UK
The new Teaching Resource Website contains over 225 resources contributed by academics in the Materials Education Community. The resources are intended primarily for materials related courses at the undergraduate level across Science, Engineering and Design disciplines. Most are password protected and only available to educators using CES EduPack, however a growing number are also now open access. The site includes:
- Exercises with Worked Solutions (350+)
- PowerPoint Lectures (70+)
- Videos and Webinar Recordings
- Databases and Project Files
- Teach-yourself manuals
- White Papers
Granta plans to continue adding more resources and we are very interested to hear about good resources that we should be linking to, good resource websites we should be collaborating with and any other ideas ….
Enabling Eco Design and Responding to Environmental Regulations
J. O’Hare and M. Hsieh
Granta Design, UK
Managing the environmental impact of products and meeting environmental regulations are becoming critical success factors for engineering enterprises. By far the best response is to build consideration of these factors into design – where changes to products cost least and have greatest impact. Furthermore, decisions relating to materials and manufacturing processes are central, since these determine the use of restricted substances and have a major influence on energy usage and emissions over a product’s lifetime. Designers and engineers therefore have a pivotal role to play in developing more environmentally sustainable products.
This poster describes how Granta, in close collaboration with industry, is developing quick, practical eco design tools for designers, such as:
- Eco Audit—providing a quick, practical means for designers to estimate energy usage and CO2 footprint of a product throughout its lifecycle.
- Restricted substances – enables design in the context of regulations such as the European Union's REACH legislation
- Gateway – integrations with leading CAD, CAE and PLM systems allows designers to access the Eco Audit and Restricted Substance technology within their native software environments.
- Materials and Eco data – our MaterialUniverse provides generic property data for 3500+ engineering materials and is supplemented by data on restricted substances, eco properties and coatings.
Bioinspired Design
N. Rahbar
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA
There is a great interest in the use of natural materials in the engineering field. These natural materials are known for their light weight and strength. Also the design of mechanically robust structural systems has always been in structural engineering and applied mechanics. Many Studies have shown the robustness of biological materials in their nature.
Bioinspired design of materials and structural systems is the study of biological structures, their functions and their load carrying mechanisms in order to stimulate new ideas for the design of new robust structural materials similar to what is found in nature. Learning lessons from nature seems to be a key element in this endeavour. In recent years, this has established a rapidly growing field accross multidisciplinary research areas. A thorough understanding of natural materials' deformation mechanism and functions will provide the basis for the most optimized design of structural systems and sustainable materials. At the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, we are training the undergraduate students to study nature and design eco-friendly materials. The students will conduct experiments to study the mechanical properties of some natural materials such as seashells.
Open Educational Resources for the Materials Teaching Community (Core-materials)
T. Bullough (1,2), P. Goodhew (1,2), A. Mannis (2) and A. Green (3)
1. Centre for Materials and Structures, School of Engineering, University of Liverpool, UK
2. UK Centre for Materials Education
3. MATTER
There is always a demand for quality electronic teaching resources to support the teaching and learning of Materials. As part of a pilot project led by The UK Centre for Materials Education in conjunction with over 20 academic and industrial collaborators from around the world, the “CORE-Materials” repository (core.materials.ac.uk) provides over 1200 open educational resources (OERs, a well known example of which is MIT’s OpenCourseWare) in Materials Science and Engineering, all freely available under a range of Creative Commons licenses. So far over 750 micrographs, 150 interactive simulations, 160 texts, and 130 videos and animations have been added. These were all pre-existing resources that have now been repurposed and released freely available online, licensed for open use and for repurposing worldwide. The CORE-Materials project also included development of a facetted search interface for the materials discipline to allow resources on specific materials topics to be easily found by academic teaching staff and students. A “taxonomy” for the materials discipline was developed, which includes over 160 disciplinary terms used to tag the resources, adding significant “value” to each resource. Initial evaluation of the resource finder and the OER resources by both students and academics has indicated the project has been very successful in providing a central repository for quality materials teaching resources. The next stage is to encourage materials teaching providers to contribute and use the resources, and this has led UKCME to explore the use of “web portal” technologies such as iGoogle to facilitate delivery of the resources. Examples of the materials teaching resources will be shown, and the issues associated with this project will be discussed, including the motivation underpinning the open release of teaching resources in general, and the (often rather vague and frustrating) processes and policies associated with the release of such resources.