A Materials Outreach Program Developed By Mse Undergraduates For Junior High Students Focused On Grade Level Expectations

The Material Advantage chapter at Washington State University has developed a teaching toolkit to address materials related topics for students at the 7 and 8 grade levels in the state of Washington. The students in the chapter surveyed junior high school science teachers in regards to topics they had difficulty in addressing in classes. Density, magnetism, and electrical conductivity were three topics noted, of which demonstrating and teaching density of materials was noted by most of the teachers. To address these needs the students chose to develop a set of materials that could be distributed in a “kit” format to teachers for use in class demonstrations. These kits, developed as part of an informal chapter outreach activity, consist of ten materials of varying density, and include materials with different magnetic, electrical and optical properties. In addition to the ten identically sized materials (cylindrical rods), a graduated cylinder, an electrical conductivity tester, and a magnet are included in the kit. An accompanying worksheet prompts the junior high school students to separate the materials using the properties noted above, and gives example applications of each type of material. This paper documents the activities and pilot scale distribution of the kits by the student participants.