Communicating Materials Science to Secondary Teachers and the General Public: Outreach, Training, and Relationship Building

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This project brings 100 high school science and math teachers to the Materials Research Society (MRS) 2004 Fall Meeting, held in Boston on November 29 - December 3, 2004. At the same time, the Strange Matter exhibit developed by the MRS is on display at the Boston Museum of Science (MOS). An MRS-MOS partnership that utilizes the infrastructure offered by the MRS Fall Meeting and the science outreach expertise available at MOS implements activities designed to communicate materials sciences to the teachers and to the public, and to highlight needs, opportunities and methods of outreach to researchers attending the meeting. Teachers are paired with researchers, and together they participate in activities that include a symposium at the MRS meeting on materials science in secondary education and on linking educators and researchers, workshops for teachers at the MOS in association with the Strange Matter project, workshops for researchers on effective outreach strategies, and talks for the general public on materials sciences to be held at MOS. The project is expected to have both short-term impact via knowledge transfer and long-term impact via formation of long-term relationships between educators and researchers.