Peter V. Schwartz

Nanotechnology, Biology, Ethics and Society: Overcoming the Multidisciplinary Teaching Challenges

One of the inherent challenges of teaching any emerging technology like nanotechnology, is the fact that its core competencies flux in the new disciplines’ early stages. Nanotechnology presents an additional challenge in that its underpinnings cross multiple traditional disciplinary boundaries. We have designed a course that aims to address some of these challenges through a handful of structural features: team-based learning; a “reverse of the learning pyramid” approach; team-teaching; embedded information literacy techniques; and application-centered content. Our course is organized around four applications that are in their developmental stages: gold nanoshells for cancer treatment; molecular manufacturing; tissue engineering of a vital organ; and a microfluidic glucose sensor. These applications provide natural contexts for learning biology at the cellular level, the molecular level, the organ level and the biological systems level, respectively. They also provide natural contexts to introduce ideas of scientific uncertainty in emerging fields. In this paper, we will present the design features of our sophomore-level course Nanotechnology, biology, ethics and society and some preliminary

The Co‐Created Guatemalan Field School: Carbon Reduction with Appropriate Technology

We are exploring a collaborative development model where US students study in a developing country with local students, in this case in San Pablo, Guatemala—a village of 800 at elevation 3000 m near the Mexican Boarder. The Cal Poly summer study abroad program “Guateca”, to commence July 1, 2011, was jointly conceived with San Pablo leadership on August, 2010, and has since grown through input from both Cal Poly and San Pablo communities. The program aims to build cross‐cultural community and explore choices both societies have in the context of the rapidly changing energy landscape to develop in a way that preserves the environment and builds independence from increasingly expensive conventional energy sources.

Concentrating sunlight from an immobile primary mirror: ray-tracing results

Writing optimization code for commercially available ray-tracing software, we explore variations of concentrator geometry where sunlight is first incident onto a stationary primary mirror of circular cross section. The reflected light is incident onto a smaller, secondary moveable mirror which focuses the light onto a target. Simulations show concentrations on the order of 30 solar equivalents are possible.