UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Awarded to: Claire Davis
Institution: University of Birmingham
Funded in: 2001
Project description: The aim of this project is to pilot a scheme to create a loan library of equipment, resources and samples that schools could borrow for the duration of the materials module, to support the teaching of materials within the National Curriculum.
Background: There are a decreasing number of students applying to study undergraduate courses in Materials Science / Engineering and this has resulted in a number of departments closing or no longer offering single honours courses (e.g. Bath, Surrey). Maintaining, and hopefully increasing, the number of applicants is essential to the health of the subject. In order to increase the number of applicants students need to be made aware of the subject whilst at school, but they also need to be inspired to want to study materials.
There are a number of schemes which have been set up to try to increase the awareness of the discipline, however more effort is required to stimulate students into wanting to study materials further. One way of increasing the students' enjoyment of the subject is to make the lessons more exciting, which can be done by supporting the teachers, who in many cases lack confidence in teaching the materials related areas of the curriculum. Courses and the provision of ideas for new experiments, are established ways of providing support for teachers, however, they are of little use if the equipment and resources needed are financially out of reach to the school.
Objectives: The project aims are:
Initial discussions with teachers have indicated that this scheme would be welcomed, for example one teacher at the ASE meeting in January 2001 commented "The Institute of Physics syllabus is very good and we have just finished teaching the materials module but we would have liked additional resources."
