Poster: Engaging K 12 Students In Engineering Design Of Cooling Systems For Electronics

Successful lessons in the K-12 mathematics and science classroom incorporate hands-on testing, creative design, and relevance to real life. Consider the notorious question asked by a student to a teacher: “When am I ever going to use this?” Because students are naturally inquisitive, everyone benefits when we constructively use this trait in the learning environment and help students to answer their own questions. The purpose of this paper is to describe a lesson that engages high school mathematics and science students in an interactive relevant engineering design problem. As part of the CREAM (Culturally Relevant Engineering Applications in Mathematics) program at Washington State University, graduate students developed a lesson that reveals science and mathematics principles used to address energy dissipation problems important in our technology-based world. The dissipation of heat generated by electronic components has become a major challenge as technology becomes increasingly compact. Systems require solutions beyond air cooling. Top performance requires liquid cooling and optimizing the liquid-solid interactions that remove heat from surfaces of electronic components. In research, combining a mechanically roughened surface with a molecularly applied surface coating and an efficient liquid, heat removal can be significantly increased. A three-day lesson was developed to provide a series of activities where students could explore material properties, liquid-solid interactions, heat dissipation, and responsible engineering design. The activities advance students from being observers to being innovators as they grow their understanding of material properties and engineering design. The goal was to allow students, through the classroom experiences, to validate that design improvements can increase heat dissipation. Students learn that carefully engineered modifications result in smaller, cheaper, and more reliable personal electronics. They also see that understanding the concept of surface coating has additional relevant applications. The lesson begins by posing the question: “Can a liquid be stacked on a flat surface that has no edges?” To explore this question, students use rulers, pipettes, and electronic balances to quantify the amount of a liquid that can be stacked on a flat surface. From data collected, students determine areas, masses, and volumes, and they generate a series of bar and scatter plots to describe their results. Students are given opportunities to discuss observed and inferred differences among the different liquids and surfaces to identify and deepen understanding of surface tension principles exhibited by their experiments. On the third day, students are challenged to create their own custom liquid-solid design that will hold the most fluid for the least cost. They apply the data they collected and discussions from the previous two days to guide their design. From this series of activities, students learn about fluid properties, liquid-solid interactions, and cost versus performance design choices. This paper describes a current engineering problem, provides details of the activities, and presents evidence for impacts on high school students. Students’ attitudes about mathematics and science are revealed, as are their confidence related to doing mathematics and science. Data also P ge 15961.2 shows what students enjoyed, learned, and/or would change after participating in the lesson. A full lesson plan, activity description, and implementation instructions, with lesson worksheets are available upon request.