Penn State Science Research Faculty Participate in a Workshop Aimed to Improve Science Education
Raymond Schaak, professor of chemistry
Inorganic chemistry is one of the broadest areas of chemistry, yet one that is difficult to teach due to its heavy specialization into sub disciplines. Faculty members of Penn State’s Department of Chemistry recently helped to host a workshop developed to address this common problem in academia. The workshop, created by Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONiC), an online community of chemistry scholars, focused on solid-state materials for alternative energy needs.
Thomas Mallouk, Evan Pugh Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics, and Raymond Schaak, professor of chemistry, along with a team of chemistry faculty from other institutions, hosted twenty inorganic chemistry faculty members from across the country, as well as several Penn State graduate students, at University Park during the week of June 23–28, 2013.
Penn State was chosen as the host site for the workshop due to faculty influence on the field of inorganic materials chemistry. “Penn State has outstanding solid state inorganic chemists who are both leaders in the field and have a deep commitment to undergraduate education. That made the choice for the site for this workshop easy,” said Barbara Reisner, professor of chemistry at James Madison University and co-organizer of the workshop.
The workshop provided an opportunity for inorganic chemists to collaborate in order to develop resources that science educators can use to introduce students to research advances being made in solid state materials for alternative energy needs, such as solar power, batteries, and fuel cells.
“Inorganic chemistry is very diverse and has several distinct sub disciplines, each of which requires different technical expertise and topical training. Many small colleges, which educate a large number of our students, have a single inorganic chemist on their faculty, and as a result, not all of the areas of expertise within the field are represented,” Schaak said. “One key goal was to directly engage experts in solid state and materials chemistry with other faculty in order to make cutting-edge research accessible as classroom activities and learning tools.”
Participants in the workshop worked together to develop new teaching materials, or learning objects (LOs), for their classrooms. The teaching materials that were developed at this workshop will be available to the global inorganic chemistry community digitally through the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource, VIPEr.
“These types of events, and the freely and publicly available materials that they generate, help to equip the broader community of inorganic chemists with the tools to expand into new areas and introduce students both to topics that they normally would not be equipped to, and also to excite students with cutting edge research in areas that may be outside of their primary area of expertise,” Schaak said. “This is a unique community of educators with a vision that has the potential to transform inorganic chemistry education nationally. Being a part of this initiative allows me to contribute some of my group's research to this pool of materials, but more importantly to learn how others integrate research into the classroom, to find out how other scientists teach certain topics, and to brainstorm about how we as a community can more effectively facilitate student learning and excite students at all levels about the future of inorganic chemistry through current research.”
The workshop was sponsored by a grant to IONiC from the National Science Foundation. For more information on IONiC and VIPEr, visit www.ionicviper.org.
The VIPEr workshop