Material Science Classroom Kit

A few years back I took a workshop from the American Ceramic Society and got a free Materials Science Classroom Kit. 

The workshop was a bit of a bust because of a minor snowstorm that kind of cancelled the workshop even though half the participants still showed up, and the presenters did a game job of presenting the workshop as best they could with their limited staff and attendees.

In case you'd thought about getting this kit or taking the workshop, I thought I'd run through what you get for $249 (seriously, that's the price as of my posting of this info.)

The box contains...

• package of 60 bobby pins
• propane torch top
• 5 small C clamps (maybe 2")
• 20' rolls of nichrome and copper wire
• alligator clips with wires
• string
• small electronic balance
• 6" of nitinol wire
• 6" of steel wire
• 100mL beaker
• plastic cups
• hole punch
• rubber-coated beaker tongs
• dust mask
• plastic measuring spoons
• disposable pipets
• four LEDs
• two piezoelectric discs
• two piezoelectric polymer films
• 3 each glass rods (soda lime, borosilicate, and fused silca)
• "space shuttle" tile / refratory brick
• a teacher manual of nine experiments (the full manual is available online, too, as are instructional videos for each lab)
• hot or not (putting a torch to the refractory brick and showing the it doesn't transmit heat well)
• candy fiber pull (melting jolly ranchers in the beaker and pulling it to make 'glass' fibers)
• piezoelectric materials (lighting the LEDs by bending or tapping the piezoelectric materials)
• shape memory alloys (demonstrating steel wire and nitinol wire both going into hot water)
• thermal shock (heating the three types of glass rods and plunging them into cold water)
• glass bead on a wire (making borax glass on copper and nichrome wires with a torch)
• engineered concrete (cement pucks in styrofoam bowls with student-chosen reinforcements)
• thermal processing of bobby pins (heat treating bobby pins)
• How strong is your chocolate (doing 3-point bend tests by hanging plastic cups with weights [pennies are suggested] from various chocolate candy bars)
• A textbook The Magic of Ceramics (currently $60 at Amazon)

The labs are solid labs, though I will say that many of them will seem very familiar to anyone who has attended our ASM summer workshops. (Note that I'm not claiming any sort of copying but rather than both programs have some similar DNA to them, likely coming from labs that some teachers have done in classrooms for years. Heck, the kit is endorsed by a quote from our very own Andy Nydam:

"The lessons are some of the most well-written lessons I’ve seen in the industry. They are truly great and valuable for all science teachers!"

I'll admit that I'm not sure the materials included are worth $249, particularly because teachers would have to provide a fair bit of - admittedly inexpensive - materials to perform each of the labs. The teacher manual is available online and most of the materials are easy enough to source (the nitinol, nichrome, piezoelectric film and discs, borosilicate and silica glass, and space shuttle tile would be the only ones that aren't available from Walmart or a big box hardware store). As to whether those materials are rare enough to you for the $249 price tag is up to you.

The lab manual is available online (link up above), and the textbook would be easy enough to find at a decent library. The consumable materials are also available in their replacement materials kit for just $80 and includes most of the tougher-to-source materials (other than the refractory brick).

There is also an option to request a kit grant, but that looks to be more about running a program where you need multiples of either this kit or the mini materials kit or their glass science kit - neither of which I can speak to as I have no experience with either.