Los Alamos National Laboratory Workshop Educates the Educators
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in New
Mexico (U.S.A.), recently hosted the National Educators’ Workshop from
27-30 October 1996. One hundred and twenty participants from 23 states attended
the 11th annual workshop/conference aimed at improving the teaching of materials
science, engineering, and technology. High school and college educators
attended sessions in which speakers demonstrated experiments that can be
duplicated in the classroom and participated in workshops that took them
into the labs of LANL staff members to bring leading edge materials/technologies
into the classroom.
The Hydrogen Education Outreach Activity of
the Science Education Program Office at LANL developed a special theme for
this year’s conference: Hydrogen and the Materials of a Sustainable
Energy Future. Goals of this conference component were to provide educators
with up-to-date information about hydrogen production, storage, utilization,
and related materials and to stimulate classroom and informal educational
opportunities in the development and diffusion of hydrogen technologies.
There was a real-time World Wide Web conference
for the hydrogen component. Each hydrogen program was captured through CU-SeeMe
software and sent out over the Internet. Each conference site had an e-mail
address, and many remote participants were identified. In addition, a Web
site (http://education.lanl.gov/RESOURCES/h2/)
was developed to provide conference materials.
Staff members at LANL built a solar hydrogen
energy generation kit that was demonstrated. The prototype kit contained
a photovoltaic array and an electrolyzer. As a way to demonstrate how the
renewably generated hydrogen could be utilized, a small, radio-controlled
vehicle powered by a proton exchange membrane fuel cell built at LANL was
shown.
High Schoolers Learn, Too
The Hydrogen Education Outreach Activity has
also been working with a group of chemistry students from Los Alamos High
School. The group meets on a weekly basis to learn about hydrogen and prepare
to build the hydrogen energy generation unit. LANL staff members have given
lectures and demonstrations at these evening sessions. The students and
their teacher attended the conference on scholarships.
Other workshops covered hydrogen transport through
metals, modeling codes for evaluating hydrogen-powered vehicles, fuel cells
for transportation and utility applications, hydride-based batteries, and
hydrogen separation.
The National Educators’ Workshop was sponsored
by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the NASA Langley
Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Department of
Energy, and Norfolk (Virginia, U.S.A.) State University.
©1997. All Rights Reserved. A Publication of
the National Hydrogen Association.
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