About
The National Science Foundation and the Engineering Dept at University of New Hampshire at Durham are including several teachers in research projects being run by advisers and grad students at the university. I teach at the Academy for Science and Design in Merrimack, NH, and will be assisting to run tests on material in order to gather data about how tensile and electromagnetic forces effect metal.
This sort of information is critical to understanding how to best and most safely use metal in many applications, such as bridge building, vehicle construction, and even the manufacture of soda cans.
By participating in the research, I will be better prepared to inform my students about engineering processes, available technologies, and research and career fields. I am sure I will also bring back some really fun and interesting projects that we can do in class to learn some of the same principles of materials these college students are learning.
Loading material to cut test samples in the CNC machine
Ongoing discussion-- Eric the student researcher and Brad Kinsey his adviser talk about the available parts as Eric uses modeling software to create possible parts.
The "Stretcher" This college student is teaching the high school teachers how to use the tensile force machine.
teacherinresearch 
Exciting Dawn! I hope that our students at ASD know how lucky they are!
This is cool! I haven’t seen lots of blogs before. Can anyone make one?
It’s cool that they’re involving teachers from other schools in their UNH research, though!
Yes Bridget. Anyone can make a blog using tools like WordPress, or Blogspot. Blogging is free unless you want to add extra features like your own domain name (i.e. http://www.teacherinresearch.com), want extra space for things to put on your site (i.e. large videos), or a very large number of other reasons.
Very interesting! Can we use the tensile force machine next year? It looks like fun.
I doubt we can use the machine at UNH, but I would love to have one of my ASD classes design and build a machine that we can use at school to test materials in a similar method. Or maybe a TSA team…?
Anyone up for the challenge?
Good News Issac! We can bring a group of students to use the Instron Tensile test machine !!
Now we need to design the project 😀
Awesome! Can I go even if a different class is going?
Maybe you should head the team to design the research project that will need the Instrom machine..We don’t have to do it as part of a class. A whole class would probably be too big a group, actually. Who else is interested in materials engineering?