CONASTA Event 11th July

On the 11th July 2018, some high school teachers from around Australia visited The University of Sydney and participated in a 30 minute workshop on the citizen science of the Nano Lens. The workshop was put together by Alice Williamson, Chiara Neto, and Chiara O'Reilly. The afternoon began with a talk by Alice, Chiara, and Chiara about Nano Lens.

After the talk, the teachers attended each of three activity stations. These stations were designed to engage teachers in art, science, and draw parallels between the two. Chiara O'Reilly's station had the teachers looking closely at the detail of different Australian flowers (pictured below) found around The University of Sydney. The objective was for teachers to draw these flowers after inspecting the detail, to highlight that part of an artists job is to find the detail in their subject of interest.

Alice's station carried out the procedure people should go through to measure contact angle on various surfaces. The purpose of demonstrating this was to show the teachers how they, and possibly their students could become involved in the Citizen Science Nano Lens Project, where people can make contributions to the data relating to superhydrophobic surfaces. Below are some images of Alice carrying out this experiment.

The third station was run by Chiara Neto and focused on how scientists, like artists search for and investigate the details of their subject. First Chiara demonstrated how superhydrophobic surfaces behaved, by dropping small droplets of water onto them. The droplets bounced right off the surfaces. After that, teachers had the opportunity to look at various Native Australian Flora under a microscope and see petal and leaf detail on a computer attached to the microscope.