This summer, 24 high school students from across the country traveled to Champaign-Urbana to learn about engineering education and research at the Catalyzing Ur Interest In Chemical Engineering (CURIE) camp. The CURIE camp allows students to explore different areas of engineering through demonstrations, lab tours, classroom presentations, hands-on activities and interactions with various students, staff and professors in those fields. Chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Diwakar Shukla has been the coordinator of this camp for the last ten years.
“We designed this camp to show students how training in chemical and biomolecular engineering balances fundamental science with real-world problem-solving to tackle global challenges in energy, health and sustainability,” Shukla said.
Through the activities led by faculty and students, campers were able to explore the phenomena behind many chemical engineering concepts. Although many of the activities carry over from year to year, professor Elizabeth Bickel Rogers and her research group introduced a new activity which was designed to teach the students about connecting catalyst structure to catalyst performance.
“We taught them a little bit about spectroscopy by letting them test different metal salts with flame testing,” Bickel Rogers said. “They would figure out which colors correspond to which metals and then test those different metals as catalysts for hydrogen peroxide decomposition to see which metals performed well.”
Students were able to try and change how fast the foam formed by adding more or less of the catalytic material or changing the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide. By the end of the experiment, students were able to identify the metals and quantify the reaction rates.
“Plus, I think they just had fun making lots of foam,” she said.
Other activities at the camp included polymers and recycling, computational catalysis, biomolecular transport and cooking crystals.
“Campers learned about basic chemical principles in morning lab sessions, and then spent their afternoons interacting directly with ChBE faculty to see how those exact principles drive cutting-edge research at our university,” Shukla said.
Overall, the opportunity to meet with faculty, graduate and undergraduate students to learn about chemical engineering and research can provide an inside look at a discipline that they might not fully understand.
“I think that if you are in a high school setting, chemical engineering is a little bit of a mystery,” Bickel Rogers said. “I think a lot of students go into it because they like chemistry and they like math. But if you get to meet a chemical engineer and talk to other students about what they're doing, what their classes are like, and what are the kind of problems they can uniquely solve, it sparks a better understanding of the major.”
Several members of the ChBE faculty participated in the event by organizing a variety of hands-on activities for students, including Alexander Mironenko, Alexa Kuenstler, Charles Sing, Elizabeth Bickel Rogers, Hyunjoon Kong, Paul Kenis, Simon Rogers, Xiao Su and Ying Diao. Current ChBE students also volunteered their time to assist in mentoring campers and coordinate the activities.
The CURIE camp is part of The Grainger College of Engineering’s Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) program. As the pre-college outreach and public engagement unit in Grainger Illinois, the program introduces pre-college students to active college students to explore engineering and the sciences through hands-on, minds-on activities.