Blue LED Beams Nobel Fame
Light-emitting diodes illuminate everything from traffic signals to shimmering sculptures like this one by Makoto Tojiki. But the researchers whose early 1990s breakthrough – a blue-light LED – made today’s energy-saving white lamps possible toiled mostly in the shadows… until they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014.
No longer. In September, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University, and Shuji Nakamura, a professor of materials and co-director of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Tags: blue LED, discovery, Electrical, electricity, Hiroshi Amano, Innovation, invention, Isamu Akasaki, light, Nobel Prize, Physics, Shuji Nakamura
Are your students vexed by vectors or mystified by electricity? MIT’s Open Courseware offers a series of videos designed to help students learn these and other pivotal concepts in science, technology, engineering, mathematics that are the building blocks of many engineering curricula.
In this activity, students in grades 4 to 8 use LEGO spur gears to learn about different types of gears and how they are used in many engineering devices, including bicycles, to change the speed, torque, and direction of a power source.
In this activity, teams of students in grades K-12 learn about the history and engineering behind Ferris wheels by constructing a working model using pasta, glue, and teabags.
In this activity, students in grades 5 to 12 learn about accuracy, precision, and simple machines by working in teams to design and build a robotic basketball “player” that can nail a free-throw shot three times in a row.
Students in grades 1 to 6 follow the engineering design process to build and test a catapult that launches projectiles, such as marshmallow “pumpkins.” They then make changes to improve their launcher’s aim and distance it can hurl the projectile.
Why do airplanes fly? What is genetic engineering? To help K-12 students and teachers understand such topics, MIT has tapped its 10,000 brilliant young scholars to create engaging, short videos to supplement classroom instruction.
In this lesson, teams of students in grades 4 – 8 learn about basic aerodynamics by constructing a rocket from a balloon propelled along a guide-string. They use this model to learn about Newton’s three laws of motion, examining the effect of different forces on the motion of the rocket.
In this lesson, students in grades 3 – 12 will explore the engineering design process by building a device that can launch a ping-pong ball high enough for them to catch it.
