Materials Camp for Teachers on Montana Tech Campus

07/02/2019

Montana Tech will be the host site for an ASM Materials Education Foundation Materials Camp for high school and middle school teachers on July 15-19, 2019. The Materials Camp is a free professional development workshop to help teachers better understand and teach science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects through real-world materials science examples. The camps are taught by experienced and trained instructors, primarily educators themselves.

The camp at Montana Tech is a 5-day program where teachers from all over the country, not just local, learn inquiry-based techniques to engage their students. This year, the camp will provide 20 teachers with simple, low-cost experiments that can be easily integrated into lesson plans. Over 97% of past participants surveyed have already incorporated experiments and concepts they learned at Materials Camp into their lesson plans.

There is a growing need for materials science in the classroom; materials topics are great motivators in any STEM course due to the accessible, real-world. The ASM Materials Camp is a proven program that helps teachers strengthen their curriculum in STEM courses. Integration of the lessons learned at the Materials Camp for Teachers into the classroom can help spark student interest in and discover career opportunities in science and engineering. There are over 300,000 types of materials and new ones are being invented all of the time.

The host at Montana Tech, Dr. Courtney Young, emphasizes, “Just think about it. You can combine various elements on the periodic table and develop them into a new material. The question is, does it have properties that allow it to be useful?’” He adds, “The Montana Tech Teacher’s Camp is unique because teachers not only learn in the classroom and lab but also from direct applications on industrial fieldtrips and guest speakers thanks to local and regional companies like Montana Precision Products, REC Silicon, Montana Resources, Barrick Golden Sunlight, Newmont, Goldcorp, and American Chemet.”

The ASM Materials Education Foundation provides for the advancement of scientific and engineering knowledge through its support of education and outreach programs. Thanks to the hard work of ASM volunteers, the ASM Foundation can provide exciting opportunities for young people, encouraging them to pursue careers in materials science and engineering.

To learn more about the Materials Camp program, visit, http://www.asmfoundation.org/who-we-impact/teachers/teacher-materials/. To learn more about ASM Materials Education Foundation, visit asmfoundation.org or call 440-338-5151 to speak with an ASM Foundation representative. You can also inquire at Montana Tech by calling Amy Verlanic and/or Courtney Young at 800-445-TECH.