Boston

Materials scientists in the United States are mounting a concerted effort to get their discipline taught at high school.

“It's time to stop looking at science as just chemistry, physics or biology. We need to recognize materials science as fundamental,” says Michael Rubner, a polymer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The basic notion of what a materials scientist does should be passed on at the earliest possible time.”

Teachers involved in the effort admit that materials science is an unfamiliar concept to their pupils. “I don't think anyone's heard of it,” says David Ruth, who teaches at South Seneca High School in Ovid, New York. But Ruth believes that his efforts to bring materials to life are drawing kids in.

Thomas Stoebe, a materials scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the discipline is already reaching schools as a result of week-long teacher-training programmes he has helped to establish. More than 200 teachers across the country have taken the lessons back to their classrooms.

Last month the National Science Foundation brought 90 teachers to a Materials Research Society meeting in Boston for a symposium on teaching materials science in schools. It has also been expanding its Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programme, which sponsors about 140 teachers each summer to train at materials-science departments in leading universities.

RET programmes have helped teachers develop ways of introducing such topics into the classroom. One lesson, developed at Pennsylvania State University, focuses on the question: “How do planes fly?” It includes the construction of a wind tunnel to teach basic concepts in aerodynamics and materials.

But some teachers worry that the No Child Left Behind act, which calls for standardized testing on core subjects, will squeeze out more specialized teaching. “With this programme, we're actually worse off,” says Caroline Goode of the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Virginia.

Even though programmes that train just a few hundred teachers receive little funding, Rubner says they can still have “an enormous impact” as teachers return from their training programmes and spread the word to others. “It is having a ripple effect,” he says.