NanoDays

Whether your team includes an army of local graduate students, or a handful of museum educators, or a mix of volunteers, scientists, and industry partners, we want to see who they are! Snap a picture of your NanoDays team this year (be sure to have anyone in the photo sign a release) and send it our way!

NanoDays 2011 at the Sciencenter in Ithaca, NY

Remember your first NanoDays?

The Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art (RIMOSA) is getting ready for their first ever NanoDays this year and they’re excited!

What do you remember from your first NanoDays?
What advice do you have to share?
How do you keep your NanoDays events fresh?

NanoDays 2012 is just around the corner!  We'd love to hear your 140-character stories, comments, and/or advice on Twitter.  Just be sure to use #nanodays.  Good luck with your planning and preparation!

Note: the Twitter bird was unavailable for this picture, so we got his cousin, Squawk, instead.

What exactly does it take to make a NanoDays kit?  Oh, only 650 personhours, 3,600 boxes, over a mile of reinforced tape (6,000ft!), and a lot of love.  

See the whole process here!  

(Don't worry, it won't take you hundreds of hours to watch.....we sped it up.)

Our apologies for not communicating this better, but the sieves for the Ball Sorter activity (NanoDays 2012) will be shipped in the same box as the nano gold.  The sieves did not arrive at the warehouse in time to pack them in the large box.  So, in an effort to avoid sending all of you yet another separate box, we did some troubleshooting and decided to pack them with the gold.  

Unfortunately, this is not a story about a man named Jed, who could barely keep his family fed; who became a millionaire and subsequently moved away from there.  No, this is a story about a solution of nano gold and why it’s being protected from the cold.  It will be shipped separately from the main NanoDays kit, only to keep it from getting frost-bit.  Ok, no more rhyming.  It’s starting to get confining. (ok, seriously…)

NanoDays kits will be shipped in early January, 2012. Please note that the kit will come in three separate boxes this year:

Regional hub leaders are contacting NanoDays physical kit applicants individually regarding awards.  As always, making decisions was a difficult process with only 225 physical kits to award.  We encourage all those who were not awarded a physical kit to utilize the digital materials in their ongoing education efforts.  The new digital kit will be posted here by January 15th: http://www.nisenet.org/nanodays/kit/digital

The deadline for applying for NanoDays physical kits is Thursday, December 8th!  Similar to past years, we expect to reeive many more applications than kits, and once again this will be a competitive process. If your organization is not awarded a kit, we will have all the materials available online for download.

Looking for ideas for NanoDays 2012? I'll be highlighting some examples of NanoDays activities from the 2011 NanoDays reports in the NISE Net blog over the next few weeks.

A number of partners last year included science theater in their NanoDays offerings, with many adding the 10-minute Attack of the Nanoscientist play to their lineup: