Navigating Nuclear: Bringing it homeANS NewsEducationMay 26, 2020, 11:03AM|ANS News StaffAmerican Nuclear Society members who are parenting K–12 students have been drafted to serve as home educators during the COVID-19 pandemic. While schools may have provided e-learning resources, the school year is at an end. How can concerned parents prevent the dreaded summer slide?Here’s our suggestion: turn to Navigating Nuclear: Energizing Our World, ANS’s K–12 curriculum developed in partnership with Discovery Education, and teach nuclear chemistry! Even if you live apart from the children in your life, consider using Zoom to introduce Navigating Nuclear to children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.Navigating Nuclear offers inquiry-based lessons, STEM Project Starters, and virtual field trips. Nearly all Navigating Nuclear activities can be adapted to the home setting. (If you happen to have a Geiger counter handy, count yourself lucky—you can complete the Measuring Radiation lesson as well.)Every component of Navigating Nuclear comes with an Educator’s Guide that provides background on the topic, the essential questions being asked, and the objective of the lesson. Even if you’ve never taught before, the Educator’s Guide can lead you, step-by-step, through a lesson.ANS Education Specialist Janice Lindegard has some advice for parents trying this at home:Read through the entire Educator’s Guide before trying to teach a lesson.Look through any PowerPoints and watch embedded videos before teaching the lesson.Resist the urge to lecture. Resist it with all your might. It makes the lesson less interesting to the students and guides the students’ thinking, which prevents them from making connections and discoveries on their own. The ideas that students come up with are often insightful and may even be an opportunity for the teacher to learn.Don’t be restricted by the grade-level suggestions. The materials—and especially the STEM Project Starters—can be used for a variety of grade levels.Don’t try to speed up the timeline. Each item is broken down into what to do on each day. Trying to fit it all into one day risks students losing interest and not learning as thoroughly.The virtual field trips can be used as outlined in the accompanying Educator Guides, or they can be shown in short, pre-divided segments to accompany other lessons.Visit Navigating Nuclear today, and have fun exploring with your students!Tags:k-12 educationnavigating nuclearonline resourcesShare:LinkedInTwitterFacebook
The value of “fluffy” stuffMary Lou Dunzik-GougarYou know the old saying that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach? Well, I say anyone thinking that way should be kept far away from students!In my time at Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory, I worked with incredible scientists and engineers doing cutting-edge research. Unfortunately, making progress in research is not always conducive to the education and training of those who haven’t yet gained the necessary expertise. And there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs the more one gains in education and experience: We tend to forget what we were like before, what it was like not to know everything we do now. More than one of my PhD colleagues at the national labs dismissed the education and outreach efforts that I pursued in my spare time: scouts, K-12 classroom visits, teacher workshops, science expos, etc., viewing any focus other than the truly technical as just “fluffy” and a waste of valuable time and effort.Go to Article
Giving Tuesday: Bringing nuclear to every classroomGiving Tuesday is a nationwide day of giving back to the not-for-profit community. For Giving Tuesday, the American Nuclear Society is on a mission–jumpstart funding for a special initiative, Nuclear in Every Classroom. This landmark effort helps ensure nuclear science and technology crosses the desks – virtual or in-person – of every k-12 student and teacher in the nation. The initiative builds upon the success of Navigating Nuclear: Energizing Our World, the ANS partnership with Discovery Education that has reached over 1.3 million students.Go to Article
Elementary school resources added to Navigating NuclearElementary school lesson plans are the latest additions to the Navigating Nuclear: Energizing Our World website. The two lesson plans were created to help students in grades 3-5 understand the power of the atom and how to investigate different energy sources.Navigating Nuclear is a K-12 nuclear science and energy curriculum created in partnership by the American Nuclear Society and Discovery Education, with lead funding from the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy.Go to Article
Nuclear in K-12 education: Overview of ANS toolkit and reflections from educatorsA free webinar today from 3:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m. (EDT) will look at the resources that the American Nuclear Society has developed with Discovery Education and the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy to help K-12 educators teach nuclear science and technology.The webinar will begin with an overview of the resources, followed by reflections and commentary from three educators of various grade levels on their experiences teaching nuclear science and their thoughts about ANS’s instructional materials. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A session with the panelists.Registration is required for this Nuclear Science Week event.Go to Article
ANS celebrates Nuclear Science Week with social media campaign, new RIPB webpageThe nuclear industry has embraced the risk-informed and performance-based (RIPB) decision-making process over the past two decades. Still, it remains a complex concept to explain in lay terms.With that in mind, the American Nuclear Society will be kicking off an RIPB awareness social media campaign as part of Nuclear Science Week 2020, which begins today and runs through Friday. The campaign will link decision making to everyday events in a person's life and feature a series of images and seemingly easy questions requiring a choice to be made. For example, ANS asks, “Would you get rid of your car if the radio didn’t work?” or “Would you toss a lamp if the shade was dirty?”Go to Article
ARPA-E Energy Briefs highlight innovations and programsThe Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is at work developing and demonstrating novel energy technologies and connecting those technologies with private-sector investors. The researchers and innovators behind ARPA-E want to tell you all about it in a series of “Energy Briefs” available through the agency’s YouTube channel.Go to Article
YMG’s new Rad Talks series gets under wayThe ANS Young Members Group is launching a new series of virtual events called Rad Talks. Inspired by the concept of salon dinners, each Rad Talks session will spotlight an influential nuclear industry leader in an interactive discussion with a limited number of participants. The sessions are open to young and student members.Go to Article
Spotlighting teamwork and new ideas at LLNLThe sixth and most recent installment in the ANS Young Members Group (YMG) Spotlight on National Labs webinar series explored nuclear science and engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on July 16.Go to Article
Recapping the ANS/NEI Advanced Reactor Codes and Standards WorkshopAs industry steps up its efforts to design, develop, and deploy advanced reactors, codes and standards must be developed to support these technologies. Toward that end, ANS and the Nuclear Energy Institute collaborated to host a virtual workshop on June 23 for industry partners to discuss the development of advanced reactor codes and standards.NEI’s senior director of new reactors, Marc Nichol, welcomed more than 400 attendees to the online meeting, and ANS’s director of government relations, John Starkey, outlined the meeting logistics.Go to Article
ANS offers diversity, equity, and inclusion resources for all community membersThe Diversity and Inclusion in ANS program is guided by the Diversity and Inclusion in ANS (DIA) Committee to promote diversity and inclusion in nuclear science, technology, and engineering and to promote and support the participation of underrepresented or marginalized groups within the Society, including—but not limited to—women, persons of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and persons with disabilities.Go to Article