For K-12 Students

No matter how old or you are, learning about nanotechnology can be fun and exciting. All around the country, we have found new ways to learn about nanotechnology. There are museum exhibits with hands-on experiments and exhibits, and even if you can't get there, you can watch the experiments and visit the museums online. There are magazines with cool stories and games about nanotechnology. Check out the nanotechnology bus that drives around the country and find out when it's coming to your town. There's even a program to learn about nanotechnology by playing with Legos®!

Students learn about nanoscience and nanotechnology at the NanoDays event hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Visit nisenet.org for this year's dates and locations. Image: UNL

Here you will see that nanotechnology is not just one thing. It is chemistry, physics, biology and materials science at the molecular level. After all, every one of us is made of atoms!

Check out these links to learn more about the fun and interesting ways you can learn about nanotechnology. (You may need to install the latest version of Flash to play some of the games.)

Nanooze is an online and print science magazine created by Cornell University as part of the education programs of the NNIN--the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network. It has online games, articles, and a blog, and you can view it in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

If you are headed to the Walt Disney World Resort® in Florida, be sure to see the nanotechnology exhibit, Take a Nanooze Break, housed at INNOVENTIONS at Epcot®. This exhibit allows visitors to understand the tiny world of nanotechnology through hands-on experiments that use microscopes to reveal exciting images invisible to the naked eye. There is also an exhibit at Disneyland® in California within Inventions at Tomorrowland®.

NanoDays is a nationwide nanotechnology festival that take place for one week each year at more than 200 science museums and other locations across the country from Puerto Rico to Hawaii. It teaches about the nanoscale in ingenious ways to people of all ages. Visit the NISE Network website for this year's dates and locations.

The VizLab image collection on the NISE Net educational website has amazing photos of the nanoscale, some with artists’ enhancements.

Howard University's mobile nanoscience laboratory, the NanoExpress.

The NanoExpress trailer of NNIN’s Howard University site takes nanoscience to towns all over America with its “mobile science theme park.”

The Strange New World of Nanotechnology is an absorbing and lively 17-minute video introduction to nanotechnology made at Cambridge University. It has wonderful real pictures of nanoscale materials so tiny they can’t be seen by a regular optical microscope.

How Small is Nanotechnology? offers an interactive, multimedia approach to learning about the nanoscale. It is part of the NanoZone website run by the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dragonfly TV’s Nanosphere is the nanotechnology part of a multimedia science education program that combines television, community outreach, print materials, science kits, and web-based information and activities.

Boston’s Museum of Science Nanotechnology webpage offers podcasts, cable TV news stories, presentation videos, and calendars of live activities. The museum helped to launch the annual nationwide nanotechnology event called NanoDays.