Materials Science C

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Re: Materials Science C

Post by chalker »

andrewwski wrote:On that note, do any national folks here know who maintains this page? http://mypage.iu.edu/~lwoz/socrime/Modu ... iments.htm

It's the site linked as "resources for event supervisors" on soinc.org, but many of these are quite frankly terrible suggestions or are a very poor demonstration of the concepts they are trying to illustrate.
It's Linda Wozniewski, the chair of the chemistry committee. Why do you say they are terrible suggestions? Best I can tell, they are exactly in line with intro materials science concepts the rules are trying to emphasize. Sure they don't use sophisticated equipment, but that's the whole point, most people don't have specialized equipment available. If you have some alternative suggestions feel free to pass them on.

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Re: Materials Science C

Post by andrewwski »

I agree that the concepts are in line with the rules, but some of the suggested experiments are flawed. A few thoughts:

Young's Modulus 1: This isn't really measuring Young's Modulus, and likely could serve to actually confuse the students as to what Young's Modulus actually is. This experiment suggests permanently deforming a non-Newtonian fluid and using the force applied and change in height to calculate Young's Modulus. However, Young's Modulus is defined as the slope of the stress-strain curve in the linear elastic region - before permanent deformation occurs. Using the maximum force applied and the amount of permanent deformation does not give Young's Modulus.

Young's Modulus 2: The theory behind this test is sound - it's trying to create a three-point load test using easy-to-find materials. However, in practice I have not found this to work well. Materials such as paperclips or wires are suggested, and these materials tend to be soft and easy to permanently deform. I'm finding that when significant enough of a load is applied to cause reasonably measurable deflection, the wire doesn't return to its original position when unloaded. This could be mitigated by creating a larger setup - I'm going to see if creating a 2-3 meter long one would work better - unfortunately then transport becomes a problem.

Shear Modulus: The primary mode of deflection in this setup will be due to bending, not shear. The shear modulus cannot be accurately calculated in this case. If it was desired that the deflection be primarily due to shear, the plate would need to be thick, and the forces needed to cause a measurable deflection would be large.

I would not say all of the suggestions are terrible, but several of them are flawed. The first Young's Modulus experiment especially, as it would not be contributing to the students' understanding of the concept.
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by Skink »

This event is ridiculous. I had heard rumors but had not looked at the rules until the opportunity to supervise it fell into my lap. I can imagine folks nationwide are...apprehensive about this one, to say the least. And that's ignoring the students who have to prepare for it. At a tournament of, say, ten teams, how many come decently prepared for not only the paper chemistry but the laboratory activities? Two? Yikes. This seems like an event that, more than the vast majority of the others, drops out the bottom quickly. The only topics that seem as if students could walk in and work with are density and unit cell business, the latter of which is taught in AP chemistry courses. This might be worse than Mission in B because it's a burden on both coaches and participants!
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by hpfananu »

Skink wrote:This event is ridiculous. I had heard rumors but had not looked at the rules until the opportunity to supervise it fell into my lap. I can imagine folks nationwide are...apprehensive about this one, to say the least. And that's ignoring the students who have to prepare for it. At a tournament of, say, ten teams, how many come decently prepared for not only the paper chemistry but the laboratory activities? Two? Yikes. This seems like an event that, more than the vast majority of the others, drops out the bottom quickly. The only topics that seem as if students could walk in and work with are density and unit cell business, the latter of which is taught in AP chemistry courses. This might be worse than Mission in B because it's a burden on both coaches and participants!
While I definitely agree that this event is very challenging, I do not think it's ridiculous, and that's coming from someone who prepared for this event, did not have ANY physics knowledge or AP Chem knowledge, and won nationals (it's possible). This event, in my opinion, is really great for Science Olympiad because it's an equalizer; you can still win without background knowledge, as long as you're willing to put in the effort. Of course the labs are hard and frankly, I wasn't prepared for them at State, but I think there are definitely ways to prepare for the labs that don't cost huge sums of money. In fact, for a Young's Modulus lab, we prepared by making our own testing rig out of a ruler and a ring stand from the chemistry department. Sometimes, you don't need to do the lab to understand how's it's done as well; many times I read the info sheets of potential labs and felt prepared right there. Additionally, after helping proctor this event once, one thing that I noticed was that the lab wasn't actually the reason students did bad. They just didn't know Materials Science. In fact, many times the labs are actually the easiest part because there is usually some guidance as to what to do and dividing and conquering usually does the trick.

However, it is true that the scores do get rather low at the bottom of the ranks. I definitely saw scores ranging from 7 points to around 80 points. I think one of the main reasons for that though is because the event is new, not because the topic is so esoteric that no one can understand. If you look at Disease Detectives, that event is definitely not taught in school (at all). The main difference is that it's established. I think that over time, MatSci will get more resources and more tests that will make this event a lot more accessible.

The best part about this event, in my opinion, is that it's really applicable to actual engineering fields, even though it's difficult. This event made me seriously consider majoring in Materials Science and I'm really glad for that.
Also, if anyone wants any help supervising any Materials Science event anywhere, please feel free to message me. I'm more than willing to help.

tl;dr MatSci is hard but reasonable.
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by Skink »

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I do agree that, ideally, SO events should be equalizers. Chem Lab isn't terribly interesting, by contrast, because, often, it's just a weaker AP test. That favors upperclassmen already. This event, mostly everyone starts from scratch.

But the fact that you note a lack of materials for preparation being out there is interesting. I'd wager if there was more out there that my gripe would be lessened because A)participants would generally come more prepared and B)event supervisors would have less difficulty facing the learning curve. A is a given with many events, sure, but B is another problem entirely. Folks have enough difficulty with Shock Value or the B chemistry events, which, in my opinion, are accessible, let alone something as hard engineering as this. I am seeing a miasma. There are suggested laboratory activities that are cheap and not materials-intensive, but, then, above I read that they're not well designed. I could pump 20hrs of reading into this in addition to time spent test writing in an attempt to sort that out, but therein lies the issue; most schoolteachers are unwilling to put in that time. I guess I'm just disappointed that there are not more dedicated resources out there to help with this. The National site page is hardly populated. Coaches' materials include a digital textbook, but, again, we return to the hours of reading issue. :| The trade-off is that more dedicated materials risks homogenizing tests, but it can't get any worse than it is now. Right now, we have a stack of sample problems and iffy labs resulting in a lot of folks who shy away from the event. :x
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by TheGatesofLogic »

I wouldn't say that is true, any basic physics course will inform you on the mechanics of stress and strain and Materials Science is essentially an extension of this in terms of different types of materials and also a description of it on the molecular scale. As such there are an enormous number of labs that can be done with it that only involve a few paperclips or a rubber band or something and quantifying small scale experiments. Even the portions of the event not directly involved with stress and strain are easily testable, you can measure the size of molecules by dropping them in water and measuring the maximum diameter they spread across vs the volume dropped. It really isn't as terrifying an event as people make it seem.
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by iwonder »

Well, maybe your basic physics course covers stress and strain, but those words are taboo in any of our physics 1 teachers minds. Hooke's law applies only to springs and it's F=kx to them. And also, I would say there's a lot in the event that goes beyond stress and strain.
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by Gemma W »

I would say that any good science olympiad event should go well beyond what would be covered in a normal high school class, or else there's not all that much point. I have no interest in merely regurgitating what I've already learned in school - having that base is nice, but the thing that makes scio interesting is learning new things and challenging myself. The problem with B division Heredity, for example, was that the topics were so narrowly restricted that it was impossible to make an interesting event. We don't want to have that problem in C division as well. Even if Mat Sci is pretty open-ended, it's still way better and more interesting than if it did stay within the confines of basic high school physics.
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by technomario »

What is a rough probablility that there will be multiple labs with the test this year?
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Re: Materials Science C

Post by computergeek3 »

technomario wrote:What is a rough probablility that there will be multiple labs with the test this year?
As an extremely general probability: 2, based on the topics outlined in the rules

As a more realistic range: 0-5, all of varying length and topic
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