Day Nineteen Friday 6/16/2010

Morning Research Session:

This morning we were invited to a presentation about how one group of researchers successfully altered silkworms to produce spider silk. The presentation was very detailed, and largely concerned molecular biology, so it was a bit difficult for me to keep up! However, I was very interested in the processes used by the scientists that are really mathematical in nature. These will help me focus on important concepts in my high school math classes and to give my students relevant applications.

The mathematical ideas that I saw in the presentation included the following:

• permutations and combinations in relation to genetic encoding of DNA
• multiple iterations of the same process over and over again in order to ensure the desired sequence of genes is pass on
• sequences and series concepts as the relate to genetics
• recognition of palindromic sequences in order to "cut and paste" the proper bit of the DNA code
• the doubling strategy used to multiply the amount of base pairs
• the meaning of a "vector" in physics vs. mathematics vs. biological systems

Afternoon Teaching Fellows Session

This afternoon was spent debriefing the MSTF program, where fellows shared ideas about the good and bad portions of the program. Most of us agreed that the program went well and was very educational, but there were suggestions made about how to refine things in the future. Some of the ideas are listed below:

• Since many of the graduate students assisting us in the lab tended to arrive at 10 am or later, it might be better to have the teaching fellows class sessions in the morning so we can attend the labs in the afternoon.
• The afternoon teaching sessions this year were very good, with many positive comments about the increased involvement of the teaching mentors.
• The only thing not fully developed in the afternoon sessions was the nature of science, which was disappointing to some.
• New teachers could have been surveyed on what technology they would like to focus upon in the afternoon sessions--for example, Gladys mentioned she would have liked to see a software program called MegaStat, which is supposed to be especially useful for national board certification.
  
• There was a discussion about spending less time in class and more time in the research lab, but no consensus was reached.
• There was some discussion about striking a balance between research and lesson development. We all liked having time on Friday afternoons to share lesson ideas.
• It may have been helpful to have teachers come before the first day to get an overview of the research being done in their assigned lab, or at least to get some research articles to study to get us up to speed before reporting the first day.
• Some teachers would have liked to choose the lab in which they were involved, while other teachers appreciated that it was chosen for them, thereby broadening their horizons.
• Fellows who had a specific project to work on in their lab felt they got a lot more from the experience than those who didn't. In the future it might be helpful to have the Principal Investigator in each lab assign a specific project (or survey the lab graduate students about a possible project for teaching fellows--as did Dr. Nemanich for Amber and I).
• A few teachers noticed a big disconnect between what actually goes on in our high school classrooms and what the graduate students and professors think goes on. University people seem as naive about the nature of the HS science room as our students are about the nature of scientific research. We did not believe it was necessarily our function here to disabuse them of their naivete.
  

Day Eighteen Thurs 6/15/2010

Today was devoted to preparing for and hosting the afternoon poster session. There was a good turn out for the session, and I got some excellent questions about my poster. My favorite conversation was with the representative from Science Foundation Arizona. He had many questions about the nature of science and education and how to improve science education in the state. He compared explaining the nature of science to legislators to trying to explain my vanadium dots project to his wife's bridge group.

Most of the graduate students from our lab showed up (see photo), which was very nice. They have been immensely helpful and we are hoping to continue a relationship with them throughout the year.

Day Seventeen Wednesday 6/14/2010

Note: Any mistakes in the scientific facts or concepts are my own.

Research Activities:

Most of our research has been wrapped up now. We spent the morning taking any last photos of the equipment for our curriculum activities.

Teaching Fellows Session:

We took care of last minute logistical details before tomorrow's poster session, and then headed over to some action research presentations for the MNS program.

The first presentation was by Anne Marie Condes and Nathan Bradford, and was about the results of their study on Single Gender Cooperative Learning. They decided to investigate this issue to see if the stereotypes about how boys and girls work in groups are true. Boys, it seems, tend to be assertive in groups, raising objections directly and trying to prove they are right. Girls, on the other hand, tend to raise questions and objections more indirectly through questioning other group members. The two action researchers arranged their classes into both mixed-gender and single-gender groups and studied student progress via FCI scores, journals, and a survey. In general, single-gender groups tended to improve the attitude and FCI scores of girls, while not hurting boys at all.

The second presentation concerned the use of a substance metaphor to teach momentum in HS physics. The presenter shared how he did this with his conceptual physics students. I found this to be an interesting pedagogical idea, but am unconvinced it is the best approach in high school. I'll have to contemplate the idea more.

Day Sixteen Tues 7/13/2010

Note: Any mistakes in the scientific facts or concepts are my own.

Research Activities:
We sat down with Chiyu to take a good look at our data. The numerical comparisons generated by the XPS before and after annealing show little to know change. (See especially the final ratios between vanadium and silicon in the table.) In normal circumstances, this would have dictated we send the sample back for longer annealing or annealing at a higher temperature.

However, this is the final week of our research fellowship, so we were under a time crunch. Furthermore, we were unsure whether our current functional heating elements in the lab can even HANDLE a higher temperature. Therefore, Dr. Nemanich told us to just stop and get the sample out of the chamber to take a look at it under the AFM (atomic force microscope).

We zoomed in under the AFM and unfortunately got a blurry picture. The best version is shown at right.
There was much discussion in our lab this morning about whether the dots shown are actually formed from vanadium. Yang pulled the image back up under the AFM and measured a typical dot: they are about 2 nm high and 20 nm in diameter. These are a bit small--a Korean professor had managed to create germanium nanodots that are about 5 time larger in both dimensions.

This small size caused concern, but then we went through other possibilities:

Could these dots be dust or contamination? No, dust particles are much larger.
Could they be hydrocarbon contamination from the surface of the sample holder? No, the XPS shows some increase in carbon, but not a sufficient amount to form these dots.
Could the white dots be the silicon? No, silicon doesn't behave that way. It may oxidize, but it will not form small peaks under annealing.
The only remaining possibility is that the white dots are, in fact, formed of vanadium. The majority opinion is that the vanadium was just beginning to for into peaks, but the sample wasn't annealed long enough for the quantum dots to truly gel. This evidence is not nearly conclusive enough for any research publication, but it is a sufficient as a starting point to say that vanadium might well form into uniform dots with further treatment.

Teaching Fellows Session:

We spent most of our time ensuring that everyone's posters looked okay on a PC platform (as opposed to the Mac platform on which most of the teaching fellows created their posters). Dr. Culbertson further directed us to complete a post-fellowship concept map of our experiences. My concept map is included below:

Day Fifteen 7/12/2010

Note: Any mistakes in the scientific facts or concepts are my own.

Research Activities:
We successfully removed our sample from the vacuum chamber and got some images from the atomic force microscope. (Again: Thanks to Amber's blog notes on using the AFM!) Our final images are shown at right.

The first image show a 500 nanometer by 500 nanometer square, while the second image is zoomed in to show 100 nm by 100nm.

Our final conclusion is that the small white dots on the zoomed in image are, by process of elimination, small peaks of vanadium. It appears as if the vanadium was starting to form into "quantum dots", but that 1 hour at 700 C was insufficient to get clear beads.

Teaching Fellows Session:
We spent a great deal of time discussing the details of this, our final week of the program. We also took class time to start a concept map of our lesson plan project and complete our posters (due tomorrow).

Day Fourteen 7/9/2010

Note: Any mistakes in the scientific facts or concepts are my own.

Research Activities: We got baseline XPS readings on our sample after it had been annealed for 1 hour at about 700 degrees Centigrade. A comparison of the "before" and "after" annealing spectra for Vanadium, Silicon, and Carbon are shown.

We are not seeing much change in these graphs, indicating that annealing did not change the surface structure of our wafer. We were also concerned because the amount of carbon on the surface of our sample seems to have increased after annealing. It is possible that heating our sample caused any hydrocarbons on the sample holder to settle on the surface of our sample.

Teaching Fellows Session:
We discussed our RTOP scoring for the second training video. We were much closer to the "expert" score on this iteration, indicating that we are getting better at using this observational tool.

We continued on to make a concept map of our lesson so far. I am still working on a concept map for the Common Core Standards in Mathematics to decide how best to incorporate my research ideas into the algebra I class.

Day Thirteen 7/8/2010

Note: Any mistakes in the scientific facts or concepts are my own.

Research Activities:
The morning started bright and early at the 8:00 am meeting of the nanosurfaces research group. Since most of the students in this group generally show up around 10:00 on a normal day, my theory is that Dr. Nemanich holds the meetings this early in some kind of evil scheme to torture his students:-)

Despite the early hour, these research meetings are still my favorite part of my summer. Seeing the thoughtful discussion, data analysis, and advances and setbacks in everyone's projects is extremely interesting. I see a definite correlation to the thoughtful discussion, data analysis, and advances and setbacks in the progress of my students during the school year. This correlation is very encouraging and reinforces the fact that scientific discourse is more important than distribution of facts in my classes. My goal is to increase student use of the tools of this discourse, including graphs, data analysis, and pictures. The language used to communicate scientific ideas seems to be universal and easily obtainable by high school students.

Teaching Fellows Session:
This afternoon was spent touring various labs. We started in the magnetic resonance research center. We first saw the big two story tall $3mil magnet thingy-mabob, which was super spiffy. The amount of information they can glean about the physical structure of very small samples was awe-inspiring. Plus, it was a huge magnet! What's not cool about that?

Next we went to see where Retta and Gladys have been spending most of their research time (among the spiders, crickets, and other critters). I especially enjoyed the explanation of how they are basically trying to dissolve or unfold spider silk without losing the basic protein structure so they can get a better image under the NMR. Getting an image of this underlying structure would be key in synthesizing future materials with the same properties. Since spider silk is so strong per unit mass, such materials (if synthesized on a large scale) would be very useful. Gina also gave us a demonstration of her intended activity with her students, using lasers to identify different small scale patterns with diffraction gratings.

We ended the day with a tour of the nanosurfaces lab in which Amber and I are conducting research.