Lily Shi

Junior Sylvia Chen watches deformed nitinol wires return to their original shape.

A laser penetrates through a flask of nanogold solution, casting a bright red line that traces the laser’s path through the fluid due to scattering from colloidal particles in the fluid. The same principles explain everyday phenomena, from why the sky appears blue to how smoke makes light rays visible at concerts.

“In nanoscience, you learn what’s happening at the nano level, but it’s usually hard to see a visual like you would in the macro world,” nanoscience student Ethan Lei (12) said. “But making the nanogold was really fun because when you add HCl, you can see the color change from red to blue and you know why. You can also see that when you shine a laser through the nanogold solution, it’s different from when you shine a laser through a red food coloring solution.”

Created by chemistry teacher Mala Raghavan, the elective centers on nanoscience: the study of materials at the “nano” scale, between one and 100 nanometers. The course is driven by hands-on labs, like the nanogold lab, where students learn concepts by working with nano-sized materials. 

“This is such a science-heavy school, and kids have taken every possible science class,” Dr. Raghavan said. “For the seniors, nanoscience is a perfect combination of all their knowledge to understand what’s really happening in nanoscience. It has all these weird, funky labs that you can try and do and explain the concepts of all these things.”

Dr. Raghavan began teaching the class in 2015, motivated by the exploding popularity of nanoscience at the time. She wanted students to understand how breakthroughs at the nanoscale shape the innovations of the modern world. 

“The applications of nanoscience are enormous — it’s basically life-changing,” Dr. Raghavan said. “AI would not have been possible if it wasn’t for nanotechnology. Computers are much better now because of nanotechnology, and the same thing with mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and all of these techniques that are learning how to manipulate things that are smaller and smaller scale and control atoms.”

Beyond the nanogold lab, students conduct a wide range of experiments to see how nanoscale principles play out in real time. Labs include testing the hydrophobicity of self-assembled monolayers and “magic sand,” creating paper models of carbon nanotubes and buckyballs and watching deformed nitinol wires return to their original shape in boiling water to test the properties of shape-memory alloys.

Ethan took the class because he wanted to dig deeper into topics he encountered on social media and learn how they actually work on the nanometer level.

“I’ve read science fiction about nanoscience, so then I wanted to know the actual science,” Ethan said. “I wanted to learn more about shape memory alloys because I learned about it on Instagram, but I didn’t get a formal understanding of it yet.”

For nanoscience student Sylvia Chen (11), the most interesting concept she has learned in the class is molecular orbital theory, used to analyze the complex behaviors of atoms and molecules by incorporating concepts that extend far beyond the simplified rules taught in AP Chemistry.

“You have regular bonding theory, which is like octets and SPDF orbitals,” Sylvia said. “What actually happens in molecules is more complicated. When you have two orbitals that overlap, they become two different orbitals that have different energy levels, and molecular orbital theory can describe a lot better what actually happens.”

While designing the course, Dr. Raghavan wanted to challenge students beyond the basic nanoscience content available online for high schoolers. Drawing inspiration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s material science video labs, she built the class curriculum using the labs to introduce nanoscience concepts like magnetism, interaction of particles, molecular structure and the optical properties of nanomaterials.

“There’s less of a set curriculum because nanoscience is a broad field and it’s not possible to cover all of it in a year,” Sylvia said. “She can pick and choose what she thinks is most important and most interesting, so sometimes we can do some extra things.”

Beyond the labs themselves, Dr. Raghavan enjoys seeing how students apply their scientific backgrounds to the challenges and experiments in the class. She hopes that the course can open doors for students to consider fields that they might not have thought about before, like materials science and nanoscience.

“It’s really fun for me to watch kids who are strong in physics, math and biology and all kinds of things come together for this course,” Dr. Raghavan said. “It’s a way for me to get the seniors excited before they go to college, like ‘look what’s out there for you, look how much fun you can have with science.’”

Gallery • 3 Photos

Lily Shi

A student uses marbles and metal rods to represent atoms and visualize how they connect.