ASM Teacher Camps - 2025

2025! 

That's the future, folks! 

Welcome to the future!

If you want to know how to be successful in that future, check out the ASM materials camp for teachers. 

The schedule for the 2025 summer camps is available online, and if you need to be convinced that the teachers camps are amazing, check out all the videos I've posted about the camps. There's no better sales pitch than the testimonials from our attendees.

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.

Summer Teacher Camps for 2024

I know what you were wondering: where are all the summer material science teacher camps in 2024?

Well, wonder no more. Here is where they all are.

If you don't know what I'm talking about - first, I'm not sure how you found your way to this blog because I think this is just about the only way people find this blog...second, check out the videos about the camp that I've posted before.

If you're wanting to sign up for one of these camps, head on over to the ASM Education Foundation website and sign the heck up!

ASM Summer Camps - 2022

And, we're back!

And you should sign up!

Not that we ever entirely went away, but the in-person versions of the ASM Materials Science camp for teachers in back for the summer of 2022. 

If you need a little convincing that the summer camps are awesome - easily the best professional development that I've ever taken - check out the stories and testimonials that I've posted on the blog in the past.

The camps start in early June and run through August. 

They cost nothing...not a single dime...not a cent.

You'll get to do thirty labs that fit into physical science, life science, material science, middle school science, elementary science, math, English, or even art courses. I can personally say that I've had teacher campers from all of those disciplines.

You'll get to see another thirty or so demonstrations.

You'll get take-home materials to do quite a few of the labs back in your classroom.

You'll get lunch and snacks provided for all five days of camp.

You'll get to visit a local material science either university or industry location and connect with university and industry professionals in your area.

You'll get the opportunity to complete two grad credit hours for $250 at the end of the week.

And if you sign up for the Salt Lake City camp or the Princeton camp or the virtual camp from July 11-15, you'll get to hang out with me either in person or virtually.

If you're interested in the camps, check out the ASM Foundation website to sign up.

Year 1 Camp - End of Week Feedback

It goes without saying, but there are so many things that we've lost in the pandemic.

One of those things that we've lost - or at least that we didn't get for a couple of summers - is the in-person, summer, ASM teacher workshops.

The summer workshops are easily the most valuable professional development experiences I've ever been a part of, and I get a lot out of them both when I've taken them and when I've helped lead them.

The above video is the end of the week feedback from the teacher campers from the 2014 camp at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana. I'm happy to say that this was one of the camps that I helped lead with Andy Nydam, one of our lead master teachers. All of the campers were asked to give a little summary of their week to camera as recorded by Glenn Daehn - who's been on the blog before. It's the kind of feedback we ask for from all of our campers at each camp, but this week we were lucky enough to get it recorded.

This camp was one of our residential camps, and lots of the campers came from hours and hours away, stayed in the dorms of Montana Tech, ate at the university's cafeteria, and spent their evenings together touring the city of Butte. We were able to see Berkeley Pit, tour a silicon purification plant, go down into Montana Tech's teaching mine, and take an historic tour of Butte as lead by a local history teacher.

For the past two summers we've run the camps as virtual experiences, and I've been impressed with how well ASM has managed to translate the camp experience into an online world...

..but the online experience isn't the in-person experience, as we're all well aware.

When we get through this mess, come and take a camp with us if you haven't before.

And if you have taken one before, come back and take another one. We'd love to see you again, and I promise that at least some of the content will be different. We've had a couple of years of playing around in our classrooms to find new things to do.

Oh, and Dr Daehn did record slightly longer sessions with some of the campers at that Montana Tech camp. You can check out that full playlist at this link.

Summer 2019 ASM Teacher Material Science Camps

The summer of 2019 looks to be a bit complicated to schedule with many weeks having only one or two camps but others having as many as nine. That means that we need a whole bunch of our master teachers to man those busy weeks and will be compressing the ordering of supplies from Flinn, Ed Inn, and IASCO. Hope Ronda's ready for us.

If you're new to the blog, take a look at the ASM material science summer camps. They're phenomenal, week-long, free summer camps for teachers where we teach inexpensive techniques for hands-on science explorations (and the science content behind them) geared toward middle- and high-school science classes.

They're awesome.

Monoclinic Sulfur demonstration

It's always fascinating to me to see video from a summer teacher camp that I am not running because I only, really know how my camps run.

I know my jokes, my patter, my schtick, my bits. I don't know how most other folks run camp - a few of them, admittedly, but not many (Rebecca Heckman, Caryn Jackson, David McGibney, Debbie Goodwin, Andy Nydam, Cynthia Hummel, Brian Wright - thanks to all of you, by the way).

Above, we see Priscilla Oshikiri and Justin Sickles (Priscilla is in the purple, by the way) performing the sulfur demonstration - at least the monoclinic part. The amorphous part is below.

I'm always open to sharing videos from our camps. If you happen to have any to share, please link to them.

Summer camp map 2018

Have you ever had déjà vu?

Or maybe déjà map?

This year's map of the ASM material science summer camps is now available (just in time for the first camp to start in a week and a few days (not Memorial Day week but the week after that).

We progress, as we have the past few years, from red during the early summer through to purple in mid-August. There is one black pin because the dates of the Knoxville camp hadn't been finalized when the list I was working from was published.

If you have any questions about the camps - and I think the vast majority of folks who frequent this blog do so because they've attended a camp - ask 'em in the comments or to me via email (phschemguy at gmail.com).

If you happen to go through the maps from the past five years (linked above), you can also see how Google maps has changed the appearance of its pins. For a more detailed look at the changes, check out Justin O'Beirne's fascinating series of posts.

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.

ASM Summer Camps - 2017

The summer ASM teacher camp schedule is up and posted on the ASM Foundation website - link here.

The teachers camps - in case you weren't aware, and the majority of you folks visiting here are probably familiar if not intimately so - are phenomenal. Check out the testimonials and news reports from the camps here.

ASM Teacher Camps - 2016

In case you were wondering just where the summer ASM teacher camps for material science would be in 2016, there's a map.

I know there is because I just made it.

You should apply for one of the camps by visiting the ASM Education Foundation teacher camp webpage.

My students are taking a test, and I can kind of watch them to make sure they're not cheating while I do this kind of stuff.

Oops, probably should check on Emily.

2015's summer ASM teacher camps

Last summer when I made the map of summer camps, I had to pay $10 a month for get access so I could add in enough layers to get each week's camps to be a different color...because that's how I wanted the map to look.

This summer, though, it appears that Google has shifted to a free service with - if not unlimited layers - at least enough free layers for my needs.

Check out the full map if the above embed doesn't work for you.

And, now that you've checked out the above map, head over to the ASM Educational Foundation website and sign the heck up.

Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development

Teaching the teachers: how a unique summer program is helping Tennessee teachers tackle science instruction.
Posted by Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development on Wednesday, July 29, 2015

It's always nice to hear good things about our summer teacher camps, especially from folks who aren't part of the program...like when the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Congrats to Lisa and Ogiemwonyi and Mort Schaffer who took our show on the road to Spring Hill, TN to not a high school or exactly a university but rather the Northfield Workforce Development and Conference Center.

Crystal growing kits (like teacher camp activities)

I really like that nearly perfect cube of NaCl (Does anybody know why would you need KCl in the solution?) I may make that a task from one of my student aides this year.

Or I may try a few different crystals that come in a crystal growing kit (item 15114) from Flinn Scientific.

Every year in our material science course, the students grow copper (II) sulfate crystals, so I'm familiar with the pretty blue crystals (shown above in the video, too), but I haven't tried the other chemicals (alum, chrome alum, nickel sulfate, and sodium chlorate) that come in the kit and which, I assume, grow via the same procedure. I should know what they look like and will post photos after this year.

Yes, I'm quasi-endorsing the purchase of a Flinn lab kit (though not this one). They're a nice way to get and try a lab once, but I will fully endorse buying the resupply chemicals separately because the kits are always more expensive than the raw materials.

Spotlight on Corrosion

This video from the National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) plays with the music so manipulatively. It opens with PBS-style music, like we're about to watch an episode of Masterpiece Theater and then shifts to ominous music before closing with hopeful, soaring music at 4:30.

Admittedly, the video is becoming fairly dated at this point, having been produced in 2005 but clearly relying on statistics and video from before that. And, let's be honest, the difference in video quality in the past ten years is fairly drastic. Still, the video is a great introduction to corrosion, showing some of the significant costs of corrosion as well as some pretty spectacular examples (Hawaii airline accident, Charlotte Motor Speedway bridge collapse) of what can go wrong because of corrosion.

Thanks, as always to NACE for being a major sponsor of our summer teacher camps with their donations of a huge number of cKits, one for each of our summer camper.

Plus they produced the video in Spanish!



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The Elements Unearthed - material science workshop

Edit: Sadly, David Black's website is no longer active as of 3/16/24.

The Elements Unearthed tells the tales of a science teacher, David V Black, at the Walden School of Liberal Arts in Provo, Utah. Black's vitae is an impressive list of projects that he and his students have taken on through the years.

Perhaps most impressively, though, Black took our ASM summer, teacher workshop in Ogden, Utah two summers ago (in 2013) and put together an outstandingly thorough report on his time there and the labs and demonstrations during the week.

If you're considering the camps, check out Mr Black's report of the camps. You can get a good idea - with some pictures - of what you'll be getting yourself into.

Administrators go to camp at WSU for STEM refresher course

Administrators?

The summer camps are about a lot more than administrators. Administrators are, of course, welcome and have attended in the past. We'll just have to change a few of our jokes.

This article from the Ogden Standard-Examineris titled as though the camp attendees are all administrators, but the article itself doesn't mention a single administrator. The article describes a lab in the teachers camp - heat treating of steel; gets a few quotes from the two master teachers and a couple of attendees; and offers up a few reasons why the camp is important.

From Adam Johnston, Weber State University physics professor:

The purpose of this camp and science education in general is to promote enthusiasm for the sciences,” he said. “We would like to see a lot of different people working in the sciences. There are a lot of great employment opportunities, and STEM knowledge is great for future jobs and for the economy. And we believe that scientifically literate people are able to make better decisions for themselves, for their communities and for voting. Understanding science helps people understand the issues at hand and make better decisions.”

Where are the ASM camps in 2014?

The 2014 ASM Teachers Camps schedule is now up and viewable online.

So, of course, I made a map...because I'm a visual learner, doncha know...

Updates: Montgomery Co added 1/23/14...Howard University, Meridian High School, Millersville University dates updates 2/16/14...Weber State and Utah University confirmed 4/8/14...Mississippi State date updated 4/26/14

ASM San Antonio Materials Camp

Great intro there -"a free, week-long camp dedicated to showing them how to turn ordinary pocket change into golden teaching tool[s]."

Yeah, it's hoaky, but that's a fair statement for what Debbie and Gissel were doing in the San Antonio camp in 2013. It's some nice coverage from the local news station.

Materials camp for teachers recap

Well, of course the teachers loved the camp. The camps are awesome.

I've never been to our Princeton summer camp, but I have worked with Brian Wright (seen at 0:26 and a few other times) who I know has lead the Princeton camp a number of times. Admittedly, I don't know Michael Ireland (shown at 1:26), but I'm sure he's awesome, too.

All-in-all, it's a nice summary of and advertisement for the summer camps.