Classes for schoolchildren on the “Nanocoatings” module

Employees of the laboratory of physics of nanostructured oxide films and coatings of the Physicotechnical Institute this academic year worked with students of the 11th grade of the technological profile of the Derzhavin Lyceum.
The “Nanocoatings” module, which is part of the program of the vocational guidance course “Individual Project” of Petrozavodsk State University, initially involved classes directly in the laboratory, but the program was rebuilt. In the second half of the year, at first, schoolchildren were offered a series of lectures, including “Self-organization and nano-coatings: what is in common?” Yakovleva Natalia Mikhailovna.

The lecture-practical lesson “Instruments of nanotechnology” was conducted by Candidate of Technical Sciences, Associate Professor Alexander Nikolaevich Kokatev, who introduced the students to modern methods of studying nanomaterials – scanning electron and probe microscopy. This theoretical introduction allowed the schoolchildren to proceed with the fulfillment of specially developed design tasks devoted to the computer analysis of images of the surface of nanoporous and nanotubular oxide coatings obtained by atomic force microscopy.

In the process of working on the project, the students mastered various techniques for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of images. They learned how to determine the dimensional parameters of nanostructures, build 3D surface models, calculate the parameters of surface roughness, establish the relationship between the parameters of obtaining nanocoatings and the shape and size of the observed nanostructures (pores, tubes, cells and particles). They managed to master these difficult procedures thanks to the help of the laboratory staff Alexander Kokatev and Christina Stepanova. At the final microconference lesson, the students presented reports on the results obtained, answered many questions from their classmates and their teachers.