Initial Publication Date: May 27, 2024

Nano.hub--Making Data and Simulation Pervasive

NanoHUB.org is a comprehensive clearing house of information for nanotechnology research, education, and collaboration, maintained by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, founded in 2002. NanoHUB.org provides modeling and simulation tools and educational materials to the world to have impact in education and research. NanoHUB.org hosts a growing collection of simulation tools that run in the cloud and are freely accessible through a web browser. In addition to these tools, NanoHUB.org is home to thousands of resources including teaching materials, courses, presentations, workshops, and more.Although most of this material is oriented towards engineering and nanotechnology, there is much to be learned about fundamental principles and practices that can be broadly applied to nanoscience interests in allied fields such as Earth and Environmental Sciences.

NanoHUB's Education Center supports learning communities on:

  • Nano for K-8, This community is a place to share information on teaching nanoscience to younger students, from kindergarten through 8th grade. Group members can communicate with one another via the forum. This may be a good place to talk about lesson plans or ways to approach certain concepts.  You can post notices for events on the group calendar and collaborate on projects with other members. You can also collect and share items using the group collections.
  • Nano for High School, This community is a place to share information on teaching nanoscience to high school students. Resources on nanoHUB that are geared towards high school students will be highlighted, and links provided to good material outside nanoHUB.  Within this group, community members can communicate with one another via the discussion forum, which is a good place to talk about lesson plans or ways that other teachers approach certain concepts. We encourage contributions from the community!  If you teach a nano-related lesson, consider sharing it with the community.  You can informally share your material through a file upload to a group collection, or the group manager will gladly help you create a nanoHUB publication.
  • Nanotechnology Workforce Development, and  
  • Nanotechnology Outreach

Focus groups are organized around topics such as

Collections of resources include. Search the full database of Resources: Teaching Materials

NanoHub-U

NanoHub-U offers a number of self-paced and instructor-led courses.  Certificates are offered only for instructor-led courses through edX.  "Transcending disciplines with short courses accessible to students in any branch of science or engineering. Cutting-edge topics distilled into short lectures with quizzes, homework, and practice exams." Check out the catalog of courses that are available.

  • Lessons From Nanoscience-- A Lecture Note Series:  "World Scientific Publishing Company: Lessons from Nanoscience.More than 50 years of research and development have created the sophisticated technologies that have shaped the world we live in. The transformation of engineering education from the practice-driven vacuum tube era to our science-driven semiconductor era played an important role in this success. Today we face new challenges in educating students, engineers, and applied scientists for a new era of electronics. Engineers will continue to need a deep understanding of their specialty, but they now also need a much broader understanding of science and technology than in the past. They need to be comfortable working from the atomic scale to the macroscale – from the materials and devices level to the system level. Lessons from Nanoscience aims to bring new approaches and new ways of thinking to materials, devices, and systems. The goal is to re-think the way we teach these topics so that working from the nanoscale to the system scale is seamless and intuitive. The Lessons from Nanoscience lecture notes series is one component of an ambitious educational initiative that includes free, online short courses offered through nanoHUB-U.
  • "Semiconductor Workforce Development through Immersive Simulations on nanoHUB.org"
    Gerhard Klimeck (nanoHUB), presented April 27, 2022 --Training Video

Nano Education Resources-- From Nano.hub

This is a database of nanoeducation resources that can be searched, filtered, and sorted. Resources are listed by topic area, grade level, core discipline, STEM content area, and resource type created by Quinn Spadola (NNCI) and Lisa Friedersdorf (NNCO).  Over 400 searchable teaching modules, videos, labs and other teaching aids are in this collection.  Importantly, this database is indexed to the 9 "Big Ideas of Nanoscale Science and Engineering" and Learning Goals developed in collaboration with NSTA (Tanya Faltens (2016).

Database of The Big Ideas in Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSTA). A Guidebook for Secondary Teachers. NanoHub Educational Resources.  Go to:  Nanoeducational Resources Database (v3--January 2017)