Alfred University 90's Ad: Ceramics Engineering

Just how 90's can one video get?

Let me count the ways

• 0:15 - dutch angles shifting back and forth (repeats at 0:31...and 0:53...and so many times) just to make things 'exciting' 
• 0:25 - flickering font on screen
• 0:37 - jumping footage, eliminating some frames to make the motion 'edgier'
• 0:40 - the good doctor's duster coat
• 0:46 - repeated, slightly closer footage of the same hammer hitting a window
• 0:49 - animation repeating quickly again and again
• 1:24 - science lab lit with green, orange, and purple lights
• 1:53 - slow motion glass jar drop
• 2:24 - unnecessary sound effect
• 2:50 - glass falling footage repeated from earlier
• 2:53 - racing footage stretched and tilted as it plays
• 3:09 - washed-out airplane footage tilting back and forth to a rock score

Ok, I quit...the cliches are just too numerous for me to note for the full fifteen minute run time of the video.

It's like the Bill Nye Show has come alive all over again.

I will recap the content, however...

• hardening tempered glass
• space shuttle tiles
• ceramic engineering lab footage
• basic ceramic properties
• possibilities of ceramic engines in cars
• catalytic converters
• superconductivity
• piezoelectric crystals
• liquid crystal window coatings
• fiber optics
• bioceramics

The animation at 2:03 - showing ion exchange to harden the surface a glass (similar to the production of Gorilla Glass) isn't necessarily a 90's cliche, but it is really well explained.

In case you're curious, Alfred University still hosts the New York State College of Ceramics. Looks like it might be fun to visit. Plus it looks like Alix (now Alexis) Clare is still there.

Updated cKit manual!!!!!

Edit: 3/15/25 - NACE is now AMPP. Their links have changed.

• Ckit labs and resources - link

We've been giving out cKits from the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (actually, they're just NACE now) at our ASM summer teachers camps for quite a few years now. The Kit is outstanding, and contains a lab manual, a comic book of Inspector Protector, a set of electrodes, a multimeter, a booklet about NACE, and a CD of the lab manual.

All of which is great...

...except the lab manual.

Which was great once but has been recently showing its age. The labs were developed by some of our ASM master teachers for NACE, and you can see their students in the lab photos. Since the labs were developed nearly twenty years ago now, however, our procedures have been refined and adjusted to be more successful, more portable, and often less wasteful. During the summer camps, then, we've been sharing the adjusted procedures and telling our campers to make those adjustments in spite of what the lab manual says.

But now we won't have to do that anymore because the lab manual has been updated.

I'll admit that I'm going to miss the iPhone-commercial-like graphics, but I'm thrilled that the manual now includes our procedure for brassing a penny.

In case you've taken our camp already and have the old version, a pdf version of the new manual has been posted by NACE on their website.

Material Science Girl's website

Material Science Girl is one of our ASM, summer camp, master teachers. She's at Tolles High School on the far west side of Columbus, a vocational high school that teaches two years of material science.

Her curriculum - created and taught along with another master teacher at Tolles - started out being pretty similar to our summer camps but has grown and evolved from there.

As a way to share documents and videos with her students - and with you and us - she made a website (matscigirl.weebly.com).

On the site, she has absolutely no personal information about herself, but she's pretty awesome. She does have individual sections about...

• ASM summer camps
• Solids
• Metals
• Ceramics & glass
• Polymers
• Composites

Sadly she doesn't have photos of the outstanding projects that her students made, but she does have a whole bunch of articles, worksheets, and lab instructions that she uses in class.

Plus she's used only her own in-class photos to mark the website sections.

Shift Happens 2014

Be careful when enunciating the title of today's video.

I used to show Shift Happens when I taught the ASM teacher camps. It's a nice, tidy, five minute educational bomb, and it spurs a decent amount of conversation about how we need to teach our students, something that isn't the overt purpose of our camps but that is certainly subtly embedded in the course of the week.

But the statistics in that original is nearly ten years old now, and the statistics we becoming dated when I started using it in 2010.

Here's an updated version from 2014. No citations are provided, of course, so take any facts with a grain of salt.

Exocharmic Reactions

Thanks to Bassam Shakhashiri for the pic and for including the Ramette article in his outstanding series of demo books.

"The joy of chemical experimentation has been well recognized, at least from the early days of alchemy, and our appreciation of chemical charm probably dates back to the prehistoric discovery of ways to make and control fire. Therefore, it seems useful to coin the term exocharmic reaction (from the Greek exo-, turning out) and, particularly in our role as chemistry teachers, to seek and share techniques for liberating as much charm as possible from the chemical changes our students in the laboratory and classroom demonstrations." ~ Richard W. Ramette

The above few sentences come from Richard W. Ramette's article in the January, 1980 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. You can get the full test on the ACS website (for a fee) or - as I found the article - in the front of Bassam Shakhashiri's of Chemical Demonstrations: a handbook for teachers of chemistry, vol 1 (the full article of which Google has posted for free).

The gist of the article - which really should be read in its four-page entirety - is that the most exocharmic reactions must be presented with content connections, enough prior knowledge (but not too much), safe methods, and the proper attitude and showmanship from the demonstrator.

There's a lot more to it, but I'll let you read the full text for yourself.

There's also a nice, follow-up article from George M Bodner from a 2001 volume of University Chemistry Education from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

evoSHIELD Demo

Becky Heckman (one of our ASM master teachers) showed me her son's new evoSHIELD wrist guard this morning. He already had one but had just gotten a new one, and she made him wait to fit it until I could see the thing fresh out of its package. The wrist guard (you can see specifically that product in the video below) is a neoprene sleeve and a plastic insert. The insert is initially sealed in a thick, assumedly air-tight foil package. When the package is opened, the insert is flexible like a gel. The insert is then placed in the sleeve and worn. As air reacts with the insert, the insert turns into a rock-hard plastic over the next twenty or so minutes in an exothermic process. Because the flexible insert is worn on the player's wrist as it hardens, the protection is almost perfectly fitted to the player's wrist forever, giving the player good - according to data I found online - protection against impact.

The company also offers similar products for hockey, football, baseball, softball, lacrosse, and even shooting pads. I'm fascinated by this and want to know way more science than what their website provides.

Anybody have any ideas on the science here?





Kinda cool that it's a university project gone right, too.

Donald Sadoway: the missing link to renewable energy

I think we can all agree that our current energy needs - and the needs predicted by our perpetually increasing demand - are untenable in the long run. Whether a scientist chooses to attack the problem from the supply end (more wind farms, increased nuclear production, clean coal, hydrofracking, gerbils on tiny wheels) or the demand end (fluorescent lights, home insulation, adjusting the thermostat, solar-powered laptops),he or she will find even their smallest success in quick and huge demand if they look to be afforadble, scaleable, and effective.

Here we see Donald Sadoway's TED talk on his development of a liquid metal battery (magnesium / molten salt / antimony) as well as his mentoring of and dependence on graduate students and post-doctoral students, choosing these intelligent but inexperienced folks rather than the more experienced battery experts whose thinking might be a little more regimented, a little less willing to experiment.

I have lots of questions about the chemistry here - how easily are the metals sourced, in the larger collections of batteries how does the heat dissipate or does it need to, what salt is in the center, how safe are the batteries, how quickly can the batteries deliver power and how quickly can they be recharged - but I am certainly intrigued.

Shift Happens

Shift Happens was first presented online in 2006 and has been remade all the way through version 6.0 now. The facts in the various videos echo a quote that we use in our opening presentation:

"To be a teacher is to be a prophet, because you are not preparing kids for the world you grew up in nor are you preparing kids for the world today. You are preparing kids for a world you cannot imagine." ~ Gordon Brown, MIT Dean of Engineering.

So much of the things that our students will need to know when they are in the job market, when they are changing jobs for the umpteenth time are things that we don't know, that we've never heard of, that we never imagined would exist.

So I guess we might as well teach them a few skills that could apply to just about anything that thy might choose to do.

Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk here covers the topic of how schools kill creativity. It's one of the more motivational speeches that I've heard about education in a while. It's a bit long, but pretty much all of us try to find a chance to show this at our summer ASM workshops. It's that good.