The Institute of Materials and Machine Mechanics is one of the six institutes of the Slovak Academy of Sciences that have participated in the "Find a scientist in yourself" action. In the frame of this action, IMMM SAS has welcomed the sixth grade pupils from the primary school, Pavol Marcely from Bratislava in April 2019, for the third time. The action aims to promote interactive education of pupils in nature-scientific and technical subjects at the second level of primary school, motivate them to live and live activities in lessons and last but not least to increase their interest in science and research.

The fact that education is challenging, but could also be engaging and appealing, was demonstrated by a team of IMMM scientists who devoted their full attention to the pupils. Our colleague Naďa Beronská led an interactive lecture and discussion on “Materials all around us.” The discussion aroused interest in why it is important to know materials and explore them. It has been found that the pupils know a lot about the materials, even if they cannot just name it correctly, so the IMMM team directed them a little.

Within the individual stations, the pupils have found together with Andrej Opálek, Miroslav Čavojský and Ľubomír Orovčík, what the materials consist of, what properties they possess and how to examine them? So they already know that the density and porosity of the materials are best demonstrated in the aquatic environment when the densest ones sink to the bottom, and the most porous ones float on the surface, but the pores are gradually filled with water, at least the open ones. They found that there was not all the gold that flashed when they analyzed brass with a chemical analyzer. And they made it clear that there was no need to bite the coins and break their teeth when they wanted to know if it is fake. They can handle it with a microhardness tester. And it didn't matter that they haven't had chemistry at school, yet. The fun was great.

No less interesting was the world of microscopy with Veronika Trembošová, Andrea Kušnierová, Štefan Nagy and Ľudmila Padúchová. How microscopes work and what is the difference between an optical and an electron microscope is already open sesame for these pupils. The microworld is amazing, and everything that has no legs and did not escape (scarves, mobiles, eyes, fingers, beetles, insects, coins, rose petals, etc.) has been observed. Since the electron microscope works on a different basis than the optical one and the samples need to be conductive to observe, it was clear that the gold-plated fly was the richest fly in Bratislava and the broader area at that time.

In the end, Tomáš Dvorák invited the pupils to the empire of tomography. Also, such 3D diagnostics by means of X-ray imaging can be very interested.

The one day research on materials ended with a contest where individual teams were to weight the different kinds of materials in the shortest possible time. The best team could only be one, but all the young scientists have gained a sweet reward.

The end of the action will be an overall review of all previous years in the near future, from which, information would help to increase the pupil’s interest in science and research.



Photo: Naďa Beronská, IMMM SAS