Here we have a set of teaching modules being developed by Yale’s CRISP (NSF MRSEC) effort. The main idea is to have a set of teaching modules/kits for secondary school students to broaden their understanding of the evolution of technology, both its history and its practices. We focus in part on the materials aspects that provide a foundation for the technology.
We have two overall approaches to this program. The first is more direct and is device based: we describe how a given type of electronic device works and what it is for, and as part of this description, we also describe the materials and their properties that underlie the technology as well as related scientific and engineering issues. Here are the present topics:
- Electronic storage:
- Light Emitting Devices:
- (under construction) Processors:
- (under construction) Memory (RAM):
The other approach is more standard, “textbook”, or linear in that it is organized by general topic. One first describes the material or objects in question, their properties, and then moves onto the devices or more complex forms based on them. Here are the present topics for this approach:
- Semiconductors: this contains multiple subtopics including semiconducting materials doping, diodes and transistors.
- Using transistors to make logic: how connecting multiple transistors creates various logic gates (e.g. NAND, NOT, and NOR)
- Using logic to store information and perform computations: combining logic gates to store bits and manipulate them
- Digital representation of information: how bits (ones and zeros) can represent numbers, images, or sounds
Shared information for all modules:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants MRSEC DMR-0520495 and DMR-0808665. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).