Learning about non-Newtonian fluids in a student-driven classroom

TL;DR

This paper presents an accessible, low-cost educational approach for teaching non-Newtonian fluids through hands-on experiments and collaborative learning, aimed at fostering scientific understanding among students.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pedagogical framework combining simple experiments with conceptual modeling for teaching non-Newtonian fluids in a student-driven setting.

Findings

Students engaged in model development and testing.

Hands-on experiments facilitated understanding of non-Newtonian behavior.

The approach fostered collaborative scientific inquiry.

Abstract

We describe a simple, low-cost experiment and corresponding pedagogical strategies for studying fluids whose viscosities depend on shear rate, referred to as non-Newtonian fluids. We developed these materials teaching for the Compass Project, an organization that fosters a creative, diverse, and collaborative community of science students at UC Berkeley. Incoming freshmen worked together in a week-long, residential program to explore physical phenomena through a combination of conceptual model-building and hands-on experimentation. During the program, students were exposed to three major aspects of scientific discovery: developing a model, testing the model, and investigating deviations from the model.