ECS’s nanolab at the big bang on 15th March!

On 15th March, as well as Erica we also had our wonderful Nano Lab lead by Dr Asa Asadollahbaik. This was a popular activity as it was interactive and had activities which would not normally take place in the classroom. A write up of the activity from Asa follows:

We had lab coveralls and lab glasses for kids to were and understand about cleanliness of nanolabs. There was a great enthusiasm among people to get into the lab coveralls and take photos of themselves. The best was a dad who had 3little kids, all younger than 6 year old and he made sure all of them get into lab coveralls and come and watch what we were doing.

We had great amount of surprise when we explain to them that 100nm is a very small dot in your hair. “Wow, that’s tiny”  was a very much regular reaction we got from kids and their parents. Another point of excitement for the kids was when during the exposure, UV light shining onto the resist throught the mask. Most of the people draw their own masks to print to the resist. When the exposure was done and we took the substrate out of the yellow box, they were very surprise to see that the pattern was transferred into the blue resist.

During the exposure we also got a lot of surprised faces, eventhough it didn’t work out perfectly well due to a lot of UV exposure from the lightning in the area. This little on in the picture was very surprised to see glass at the bottom and she asked me “so did it become glass!?”.

And of course they all loved to look into microscopes and see what we can really make! They were very much amazed with the different colours coming from diffraction grating effect from one of the wafers. One of them told me that the chip with metal contacts pointing inwards looks like a star!

The best section was probably the application stage, were they were looking into microscopes and could hear about applications and where the chips are used for. In overall we managed to talk to around 300 people, including parents and kids. But unfortunately because of the nature of the activity there were times that we had to tell people to go and come back again as we didn’t have enough space to have them in. It was great to see so many people coming into the NanoLab and keen to were coveralls and get their hands dirty. Some even asked for the substrate glass to take it away. And hey, why not! 😉