Exploring fullerenes and nanotubes in the classroom

Abstract

Informing citizens about scientific issues in our highly technological world is of major importance. Toward this end, a teaching/learning sequence (TLS) focused on the nanostructures of carbon was developed and implemented in a class of secondary school students. This topic was chosen because, on the one hand, fullerenes and nanotubes are already used in a wide range of applications, and there are impressive promises for their future uses. On the other hand, from an educational point of view, students could be introduced to the important idea that some of the interesting properties at the nanoscale level are related to the structure of matter. During the development of the TLS, the fact that students would be studying extremely small-sized particles invisible to the naked eye was taken into consideration. Because of this, models and analogies were chosen as the main teaching tools to be used. In the present work, the TLS and some findings from the first implementation in the classroom are presented and discussed.

Keywords

• analogies
• fullerenes
• high school
• nanotechnology
• nanotubes