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In November 2007 I attended the Supercomputing conference and together with Dr. Gerhard Klimeck gave a tutorial to a group of educators from middle shcool, high school and undergraduate levels. Nanoscience and Nanotechnology have created a lot of excitement in the scientific community as well as the general public. In addition, researchers and educators have recently stressed the importance of our children becoming "nano-literate" in order to meet the future needs in this field. The understanding of nano-scale phenomena requires understanding stemming from many fundamental areas: mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. This requirement can be seen as a challenge, where fundamental knowledge and awareness must be conveyed to large population. However, this requirement can be seen as an opportunity to harness the excitement of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology to teach fundamental topics within a new framework and at the same time provide to educators and parents the tools, techniques and resources to attain this goal. The Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) is an NSF-funded research and infrastructure network challenged to transform Nanoscience to Nanotechnology through online simulation and training. NCN has created two outreach vehicles geared for two significant audiences: K-12 at http://generation-nano.org and college-level at http://nanoHUB.org. The generation-nano prototype presents flash based games to students in the form of a science mission. The students go through exercises gain fundamental science knowledge while interacting with an interesting and exciting environment. nanoHUB.org delivers online simulation and tutorials to over 25,000 users annually. This tutorial will overview the capabilities of and content delivered in these two web sites. Conducting this tutorial was a great experience. I had the opportunity to get in contact with educators who were really interested in incorporating curriculum related to nanoscience. As a result of this tutorial I received feedback from the audence throgh a survey I collected for formative assessment purposes. The impact on my learning was in improving my skills in putting together the presentation with the feedback of Dr. Klimeck and the feedback from my audience to improve the content of the project. |