The Children’s Discovery Museum of West Virginia is a non-profit organization that provides a space for exceptional learning experiences and interactive play.
The WVNano Initiative partnered with the museum to organize NanoDays 2012, an event that took place on March 17.
West Virginia University students, faculty and staff volunteers led activities for the first official NanoDays event ever held in West Virginia. The event attracted about 80 visitors, mostly children with their Moms and Dads in tow.
The three-hour event included six tables worth of NanoDays kits provided by the NISE Network, a special reading of Alice in Nanoland, an exhibit of images art from scanning electron and atomic force microscopy. The visitors learned about concepts such as thin films, hydrophic coatings, graphene and nanostructures.
As a result of this successful partnership, the museum has been awarded a Nano mini-exhibition from the NISE Network; Nano is an interactive exhibition that engages guests in nanoscale science, engineering and technology. The exhibit will be constructed in 2014 and will be available to the museum in 2015.
The program was funded by National Science Foundation grants (NSF ESI-0532536 and 0940143).
Aniketa A. Shinde WVNano Initiative, West Virginia University, 886 Chestnut Ridge Rd., Morgantown, WV 26506-6223
Aniketa A. Shinde WVNano coordinater,of the educational and outreach programs. She also works collaboratively with WV EPSCoR to implement and evaluate educational and outreach activities under the 2010-2015 NSF Research Infrastructure Improvement cooperative agreement.