Materials Science Engineering Tutorials

Below are links to tutorial materials for an introductory Materials Science Engineering course at the University Level. These tutorials are designed for a small group-work classroom context, and have been shown to significantly improve student understanding of critical Materials Science Engineering concepts.

The tutorials are the product of a multi-year education research project at Ohio State University including extensive student interviews and testing as well as iterative design and testing in the classroom. The project team is:
Rebecca Rosenblatt (Illinois State Univ.), Katharine Flores (Washington Univ. in St. Louis), and Andrew Heckler (Ohio State Univ.)
Research articles on this project can be found here.

This work has been supported in part by the Center for Emergent Materials at the Ohio State University, an NSF MRSEC (Award Number DMR-0820414).

Full Tutorials

The Tutorials below have all been rigorously developed and tested in the classroom. They are designed to work in a small classroom environment of 10-30 students, broken into groups of 3-4. Typically we have two instructors with 30 students for each reciation section. As the student work on the tutorials, the instructors walk around the room, asking questions of the students to determine their progress on and understanding of the tasks in the tutorials and helping the students to work through the materials for themselves.

1. Bonding Properites of Atoms
2. Properties of Crystals & Defects
3. Diffusion
4. MechanicalProperties
5. Plastic Deformation & Strengthening
6. Failure, Creep, Fatigue, & Fracture
7.Phases and Phase Diagrams
8. TTT Diagrams
9. Ceramics, Polymers, & Electronic Properties
All 9 Classroom Tested Tutorials (zipped)

Small Modules for Individual Topics

The Modules in the link below have much of the same activities as the tutorials listed above, but they include some additional activities, and the topics are broken into smaller pieces so that an instructor can put them together as relevant.

All Modules (zipped)

Main Page / Projects List

People

Seminar

This page last modified on 2012-September-26.
For questions, corrections, etc., contact Andrew Heckler (heckler.6@osu.edu).