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Dr. Short shares some of his approaches for making this nuclear design class more tangible for his students. I would say that no matter how theoretical and abstract the course, you can always put up a tangible physical to anything you're teaching. Here are some examples of how I made the subject matter more tangible for my students.
Dr. Short holding up a fouled heat exchanger in Lecture 2. (Image courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare.) I'm not a big fan of laser pointers, and my students hadn't necessary touched any part of a reactor in their entire lives, so we're graduating all these Bachelors' in nuclear engineering without having touched pieces of a reactor. So each day, I used a different piece of a reactor as a pointer. One day, I used a zirconium fuel rod. The next day I used a steam generator tube, and so on, and passed them around at the end of the class. I'd say, "Oh, by the way, today's pointer is a zirconium fuel rod. Pick it up. Notice how much lighter it is than steel. Try bending it. Notice how strong it is."
And just putting a tangible spin on something as abstract as designing a reactor on paper really helped students grasp it, get excited about it, and absorb the information.
For example, to teach them about the granular structure of metals, we talked a little about cheddar cheese, because if you break real cheddar cheese apart, it actually fractures on the curd, so curds in cheese are like grains in metal, and there are grain boundaries or curd boundaries. That helped the students understand key ideas. What are grains? How can they fail? Do they always break through the grains, or do the break around the grains? For things like void swelling and 3D defects under irradiation, we looked at a truffle-flecked cheese, where the truffles simulated foreign body inclusions in the metal, and we actually fabricated tensile samples out of this truffle-flecked cheese. I asked the students to pull them apart, and every single students piece of cheese either failed on a truffle, which simulates a third body inclusion, or on a bubble, which simulates a void in the material. So thats how we taught them about stress concentrators. And that knowledge actually made it through into their final report, which tells me they got the intuition out of that class.