Conversation with Bob Cook, Georgia Southern Prof.

The necessity for outside contacts in the field of Nanotechnology is invaluable. If they are unrelated to the project, and involved in the nanotech field, they offer some knowledge and certainly objectivity toward the game we are designing. In order to cold call people you need to have a clear understanding of some of the terminology, so we needed to submerge our brains in the frothy bath of nanotechnology. Hopefully some of the terminology would rub off. Kat and I researched online; By visiting website after website, and continually going back and forth from Wikipedia.com, Dictionary.com, Sciencedaily.com and a few others, it made the quest much easier. The process works something like a dictionary endeavor. When looking up one word, there is many times a word in the definition that you are not quite clear about. So the snowball effect starts. Word after word needs to be looked up to understand the intimate details of Nanotechnology.

Dr. Bob Cook, Savannah State, professor, A couple of years ago, he was a part of the first US robotics Competition using Legos. The themes vary depending on the year, students or participants are given a matte,a nd asked to create robots to perform tasks. The students are between the ages of 9 and 14yrs. of age, which is the age that is found to loose interest in the sciences. Each robot performs 9-10 tasks. Cook said that the idea was for them to get an understanding of what the scientists were trying to do on a nanoscale. They would do this by taking a robot that had a given set of tasks which the kids programmed into it. The robot would go around and perform these tasks which consisted of moving a piece of pizza to a “nose”. The more tasks performed the more points achieved, and thus creating a winner!

Cook, said a Lego kit, can become a better way of learning for kids than say a neuroscience laboratory. His point is that a game is easier to understand than neuroscience. The idea of teaching kids through very hands on activities can capture their minds and imaginations better. It exercises the brain on a more whole minded way of thinking, and allows for multi-dimensional learning. He also touched on the need for a connection between the scales of nano and human. Like what exactly is a billionth of a meter, how human scale person understand that scale?