National Crystal Growing Competition Handbook (pdf)

National Crystal Growing Comp Handbook Eng

The original source is here, but I went ahead and reposted it here.

I'd always heard that in Canada there was a contest for high school students to grow the best/largest single crystals (thank you, Chem13, for introducing me to that one). Admittedly - and offensively, I'm sorry - I would typically follow that up with some repetition of Jim Carrey's "Canada" routine (thanks, Becky Heckman, for introducing me to that one).

Since I've gotten into the material science course and the CuSO4 crystal-growing world myself, however, I've been kind of interested in playing along.

Anybody wanna get something like this started in these here United States of America?

Materials Choice Award

Materials Choice Award - ASM by phschemguy

The April 2015 issue of Advanced Materials & Processes announced the creation of a new award, the Material Choice Award, sponsored by the ASM Education Foundation. I'll let Foundation Director of Development and Operations, Nichol Campana, introduce the award as she did in her monthly column.

[T]he award...is intended to familiarize middle and high school students with the materials profession and show the importance of materials in "cool" products or applications.

I like the idea. It's easy enough to point out basic materials to students - iron, cement, steel, PVC - but the world of materials is radically more interesting than that. We have carbon fiber, glass filled polymers, shrilk, graphene, aerographite, pykrete, and even thinking putty.

Interested teams will have to compete in an essay contest to winnow down the initial numbers to ten, a Facebook like contest to turn ten into six, and finally a three-minute "elevator pitch" video to find the final winners. Initial essays will be due December 4, 2015.

Personally, I'd recommend buckyballs. They're funny to say.

Ceramic Disc Golf Contest

I'm a big frisbee golf guy. When time, weather, and schedule allow, I try to play a couple of times a week, and I've even had a trio of holes in one (holes 4 & 7 at Gardener Park and 17 at Winton Woods).

Admittedly, though, I have never tried to play frisbee golf with a ceramic disc. I'm more of a Roc guy, myself.

Keramos, the American Ceramics Society, is sponsoring a contest to build a ceramic disc golf disc for the fall MS&T conference in Pittsburgh in October. The goal is to build a disc that will hold together and hit the basket from the furthest distance away (three tires from each distance - kind of like pole vault), so there's a bit of disc golf skill involved, too.

Check out the rules online or above.