Insegnamento ordini di grandezza

Teaching Orders of Magnitude

In teaching nanotechnology and molecular electronics, the concept of orders of magnitude becomes an essential underlying theme. It is a challenge to convey a change in several orders of magnitude on a linear scale. The learner needs to have a sense of the vast differences between macroscales, microscales, and nanoscales. A grasp of spatial scale landscapes is necessary for successful understanding and deployment of nanotechnologies and packaging of molecular electronic devices.

We have created a pre-college level online animated exhibit entitled "Mission Elektron". It is related to an NSF CAREER project "Theory and Modeling of a Mono-molecular Field Effect Organic Transistor (MOLFET)". The work is headed by Assistant Professor of Physics Dr. Ranjit Pati at the Department of Physics at Michigan Tech.

http://nano.mtu-mcff.org/elektron/MissionElektron.html

In the exhibit, there is a scene calling for a scale comparison between a traditional electronic switch and a novel molecular electronic switch. The size comparison may be interpreted as up to 6 orders of magnitude difference.

To help illustrate that, Google Earth was used to record a zoom from the location of an orbit around the earth to a point near the Statue of Liberty in New York. The change was from 60,000 km to 0.06 km, with pauses at each descending order of magnitude.



Though the example is in the macroscale, it provides a fluid and continuous zoom experience for the learner. The scale span is analogous to zooming from the millimeter scale to the nanoscale.