Introducing nanoengineering and nanotechnology to the first year students through an interactive seminar course

TL;DR

This paper describes a first-year seminar course on nanoengineering that combines fundamental concepts, practical laboratory visits, student presentations, and peer review to engage undergraduates early in nanotechnology education.

Contribution

It introduces an interactive, multidisciplinary approach to teaching nanoengineering to first-year students, integrating ethics, practical exposure, and active learning methods.

Findings

Students showed increased motivation and interest in nanotechnology.

The course improved students' technical writing and ethical understanding.

Hands-on visits enhanced practical understanding of nanoengineering concepts.

Abstract

We report a first year seminar course on nanoengineering, which provides a unique opportunity to get exposed to the bottom-up approach and novel nanotechnology applications in an informal small class setting early in the undergraduate engineering education. Our objective is not only to introduce the fundamentals and applications of nanoengineering but also the issues related to ethics, environmental and societal impact of nanotechnology used in engineering. To make the course more interactive, laboratory tours for microfabrication facility, microscopy facility, and nanoscale laboratory at the University of Iowa are included, which inculcate the practical feel of the technology. The course also involves active student participation through weekly student presentations, highlighting topics of interest to this field, with the incentive of "nano is everywhere" Final term papers submitted by the students involve a rigorous technology analysis through various perspectives. Furthermore, a student based peer review process is developed which helps them to improve technical writing skills, as well as address the ethical issues of academic honesty while reviewing and getting introduced to a new aspect of the area presented by their colleagues. Based on the chosen paper topics and student ratings, the student seemed motivated to learn about the novel area introduced to them through theoretical, computational and experimental aspects of the bottom-up approach.