Teaching and Outreach

I believe that curious and eager students deserve attentive and skilled teachers. I have detailed my working teaching philosophy and tenets in this linked document.

LEGOs lend themselves well to teaching! Below is a collection of some material I put together to run outreach activities using LEGOs, and other resources I found interesting

Crystal-Owens_Modular-LEGOFluidics_Titration-activity_MicroTAS-2016_Poster-guide.pdf

Here was a poster summary of an activity we ran at MicroTAS 2016 in Dublin, Ireland

Crystal-Owens_MS-Thesis_LEGO-teaching-Ch-6.pdf

This chapter of my Masters Thesis summarizes several activities I ran using LEGOs as teaching tools for chemical titration with two separate setups, and for hydrodynamic design with "Battleboats"

My full thesis can be found here (free access): https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/117456

There are many other great teaching resources using LEGOs! Some of my favorites:

For chemistry concepts:

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cti-2020-0017/html This is a fantastic collection of activities. I like the LEGO 3D periodic table, molecular orbital theory, and self-assembly, but there's a lot here

For optics:

http://www.myphotonics.eu/ This is nice in that it uses the great positioning ability of LEGOs to set up devices for optical demos

LEGO microscope:

https://physicsworld.com/a/high-resolution-microscope-is-made-from-lego-bricks/