The mind-bending world of quantum mechanics provides many opportunities to engage K-12 students in important STEM lessons, says Todd Campbell, a science education professor at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education.
Not only is the quantum realm fascinating for its strange implications, such as spooky action at a distance and the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox, quantum computing and other quantum research are growing STEM fields, which current K-12 students can potentially join and impact. All of which provides a compelling educational opportunity, Campbell says.
“We want students to see the exciting parts that are unfinished that they could play a role in,” he says. “We want them to see that we’re at the edge, and there’s applications and things that we haven’t even figured out yet, and you could be part of that.”
To that end, last summer Campbell and colleagues from UConn’s departments of Chemistry and Digital Media and Design hosted a three-day professional development event for high school chemistry teachers with the goal of helping them create new K-12 curriculum for chemistry concepts. The idea was to provide specific lessons and ideas for ways in which K-12 teachers can introduce students to the quantum world and its applications in everyday life. To do this, they created a specific high school-level unit based on modern technology built on quantum mechanics.
Campbell shares how this lesson was developed and how the thinking behind it can lead to other quantum mechanic-based lessons.
Teaching Quantum Mechanics With The Help of Modern TV
Many students won’t have to look far to see how quantum mechanics influences their lives. If they have a modern TV, there’s a decent chance it’s powered by QLED technically, which is short for Quantum Dot Light-Emitting Diode.
Campbell and his colleagues have developed a K-12 quantum unit around these QLED TVs that was built to support lessons suggested in Next Generation Science Standards, which have been adopted by a majority of states. During the unit, students learn about how quantum dots and nanoparticles, which power QLEDs, were developed in the 1980s, with the scientists who invented these awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023. Students then have to do some work to understand and conceptualize why this technology is an improvement over a traditional LED TV.
“We wanted students to think with us about what is it about quantum dot LED television that make them better than just an LED television. So why are people so excited?” he says. “These quantum dots have found broad technical and health applications.”
Environmental And Justice Impacts
Impressive as the QLED technology is, Campbell and his colleagues wanted to ensure that their lesson also encourages students to think about the implications of this technology.
“Part of what we try to do in all our work is we try to think about how innovations for some could be pollutions for others,” Campbell says. “So we’re trying to think about what are the hazards of quantum dots. And we thought about like cadmium mercury and lead, or the compounds that are generally used to make these, and those you know at that scale also could have hazards that we’re not aware of.”
The impact that emerging quantum technologies will have on society are another reason why it makes sense to start giving students practical lessons in quantum mechanics, Campbell says.
“Students can be a part of ensuring that there’s justice in how this work unfolds,” he says. “So it’s not some corporate conglomerate who decides to contract for quantum technology, it’s people who are deciding what is and isn’t the way that we want to move toward this work without exploiting, extracting, and demolishing things.”
Advice For Teachers
The unit on quantum LED TVs developed at UConn is available to other educators. However, Campbell says it’s not the only way educators can incorporate quantum mechanical exploration into their lessons.
“This is one example of a cutting-edge contemporary science focus,” Campbell says. “There are lots of others, and you really have to use the basic disciplinary core ideas that we’re teaching students to get there. So it’s a really good application of those foundational core ideas to get to the edge of of what you might be learning.”
The big idea is that connecting the seemingly far-out concepts of quantum mechanics to an everyday item such as a TV helps students better conceptualize what quantum mechanics really is.
“Students learn things and as they apply them they can make a web of connections that leads to them being able to think with those ideas later,” Campbell says.