Education and Outreach: Nanotechnology Activity Guides
NanoSugar
Audience: High school students;
non-science adults
Time Needed: 2-3 minutes
Objectives:
- To introduce the idea of the nanometer
Related Wisconsin Model Academic Science Standards:
- C.8.1 Identify questions they can investigate using resources and equipment they have available
Activity Materials:
- Sugar cubes
- Metric rulers with millimeters
Activity Instructions:
Ask the students to get into groups of two.
Give each group a sugar cube (each approximately ~1 cubic centimeter, 1 gram).
Ask the students to measure an edge of their sugar cube. (You could also have them measure one for height, width, and length and ask them to average their measurements.)
If necessary, explain that sugar is made of sugar molecules, invisible to the human eye. Explain that one sugar molecule is approximately one nanometer (according to a part of Einstein's doctoral research), and one nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
Ask the students to do the necessary calculations/conversions to figure out how many sugar molecules are along the edge of one sugar cube.
The calculations should look something like this: one edge = 1cm x 10mm/1cm x 1,000,000nm/1mm x 1 sugar molecule/1nm = 10,000,000 sugar molecules along the edge of a sugar cube.
Ask students for their answers. You could have them write their answer on the board when the finish with the calculations. Discuss how small a sugar molecule, and thus a nanometer, must be in order to get 10 million of them lined up next to each other on the edge of a sugar cube.
Required Background Information:
Students should be familiar with the metric system and how to do unit conversions. They should also know how to use a ruler with millimeters.Supplemental Materials:
- None
References:
- MRSEC - http://mrsec.wisc.edu/edetc/
Authors:
IPSE Interns: Julia Bickler, Wendy deProphetis,
Manisha Ghorai, LJ Janowski, Ed Kabara, Nancy Karuri, Yvonne Kao, Laura Kopplin,
Melissa Kurth, Lauren Sammel, Erin Schmidt, Naveen Varma
IPSE Leadership Team: Wendy C. Crone, Amy Payne, Greta Zenner, and Tom Derenne
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The Nanotechnology Activity Guides are a product of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and the Internships in Public Science Education Project of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Funding provided by the National Science Foundation.