Focus on the Content
Detailed description, with examples, of how the unit is focused on nanoscience.
Detailed description, with examples, of how the unit is grounded in real life and work beyond school.
The project will encourage the development of 21st century skills through investigating, collaborating, evaluating, and presenting their team’s project. The skills that will be exercised include:
- Students will consider how small is too small in technology. This will allow them to relate the size of a nano-sized object to objects they encountered everyday. For example, why has the cell phone gone from the size of a book to the size of the palm of your hand?
- Students will need to deal with units when moving from smaller dimensions to larger dimensions. This will allow them to be able to apply dimensional analysis in conversion problems. For example, using the “Nanometer Activity” project to allow the students to take an everyday item and see what it would be like to go from the nanoscale to the macroscale.
- Students will be learning about surface area and volume. Our unit on nanotechnology will afford them the opportunity to see why the surface area-volume ratios play a role in objects at the nanoscale.
- Students will construct arguments and give examples in our PBL of why their nanotechnology is the best. They will need to explain why properties of matter change at the nanoscale to give evidence behind why their piece of technology works.
Detailed description, with examples, of how the unit is grounded in real life and work beyond school.
The project will encourage the development of 21st century skills through investigating, collaborating, evaluating, and presenting their team’s project. The skills that will be exercised include:
- Thinking creatively to develop their product and their presentation.
- Making decisions through selecting item to design and determining key characteristics to consider.
- Solving problems will be addressed as students are dealing with the positive and negative limitations involved with nanotechnology.
- Self-Directed because students will work on their own developing their individual piece of technology to present to the class.
- Iterating will continuously happen as students are improving their product based upon the comments and suggestions from their peers, in the form of a gallery walk, for example.
- Collaboration (leadership and communication) will occur throughout the entire unit as students work together to brainstorm, create, and present their innovative product.
- Justifying and persuading will happen towards the end as students present their finished projects to the class and try to get their technology adopted.