Teaching Science using High Tech. but low cost tools. Joël Chevrier Physics Professor Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble France

Transcription

1 Teaching Science using High Tech but low cost tools Joël Chevrier Physics Professor Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble France At expo CNRS Entrée en matière Paris 2011: Use of a force feedback device originally designed for video games It is here used to discover and to explore the Brownian motion in a virtual nanoworld Production CIME Nanotech Grenoble Partenariat UJF/Grenoble INP/MINATEC/C Nano Rhône Alpes 2min50sec in - Seeing the invisible: USB connected CMOS sensor Optical Microscope X400 - Hearing the world vibrations*: USB connected MEMS Accelerometer - Embedded sensors in smartphone seen as mobile experimental physics lab Pocket Lab High Tech Sensors, Low Cost, Human perception, Connected to massive usages : smartphones, Science: Orders of magnitude, Characteristic lengths, Interactions, Mechanical vibrations at nanoscale, * a teenager discovered that she can detect and hear her own scull vibration when speaking! she also realized that a microphone cannot do that!

2 Teaching Science using High Tech but low cost tools USB Microscope Insects and water Water droplets Capillary lenght Wetting misappropriation of «general consumer» technologies: turn a low cost high tech system into an instrument for exploration misappropriation or back to the basic of this technology? this instrument used to feel, to explore and to discover invisible aspects of our environment A teenager discovers and listens the vibrations of his/her skull detected by an accelerometer Life at short scales in real environment Acari example the use of this instrument build an acquaintance and then a knowledge of these invisible aspects through direct perception, one realizes importance of instruments, performances and technologies one can then enter a scientific description based on experimental method this technology : identification of its presence in daily life its impact on environment and society how do you use it as a scientist's Apprentice or as a regular urban guy. Back to the high tech around us in our life with now an open and educated eye: - major impact - what choices - manual skill and knowledge - jobs - used earth ressources - responsability as a citizen

3 misappropriation path Turn Your Cellphone Into a High-Powered Scientific Microscope This is where it is used It has been made for this What is needed to make it Misusage of a smartphone Smith ZJ, Chu K, Espenson AR, Rahimzadeh M, Gryshuk A, et al. (2011) camera Cell-Phone-Based Platform for Biomedical Device Development and Education Applications. PLoS ONE 6(3): e doi: /journal.pone Back to Anton van Leeuwenhoek ( )? Anton van Leeuwenhoek was born in Deft, Holland. He was working as a cloth merchant and to know for sure if cloth was good he did lenses which were doing size of objects hundred times bigger. With those lenses he observed cloth. Then he did a microscope which did all object hundred times bigger and started observations of human blood, plants and some animals. misappropriation path To «misuse it», you simply put a glass microsphere on its camera misappropriation path Used here as a optical microscope

4 Accelerometer feel vibrations USB Microscope Smartphone with embedded sensors General consumer products from Nanotechnologies used to feel and explore the small world around us Hearing Seeing Touching

5 THE STARRY MESSENGER Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles, opening these to the consideration of every man, and especially of philosophers and astronomers; AS OBSERVED BY GALILEO GALILEI Gentleman of Florence Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, WITH THE AID OF A SPYGLASS Venice 1610 Great indeed are the things which in this brief treatise I propose for observation and consideration by all students of nature. I say great, because of the excellence of the subject itself, the entirely unexpected and novel character of these things, and finally because of the instrument by means of which they have been revealed to our senses. * Sounds like a very difficult way for anyone who tryes to follow it: «What Galileo did and what nobody had done before was to use the telescope in such a way that the secrets of the universe were delivered to human cognition "with the certainty of sense-perception"; that is, he put within the grasp of an earth-bound creature and its bodybound senses what had seemed forever beyond his reach, at best open to the uncertainties of speculation and imagination.» Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition 1958 But how to tell better how technology can help our senses to first simply discover and then go to science description? It is a very beautiful thing, and most gratifying to the sight, to behold the body of the moon, distant from us almost sixty earthly radii,4 as if it were no farther away than two such measures so that its diameter appears almost thirty times larger, its surface nearly nine hundred times, and its volume twenty-seven thousand times as large as when viewed with the naked eye. with this method, not all aspects described by science are within grasp. Far from this. But many are and this is a first step... Following this path open * 400 years ago, the nowadays "low cost general consumer high-tech tools", can become instruments of fantastic discoveries and explorations by means of the perception. Hopefully this path leads to knowledge and thinking. In this way one may learn with all the certainty of sense evidence that the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the earth s surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms.