Monday, October 26, 2009

Workshop at Taichung

I gave a one-day workshop on the beaded molecules for some junior high school students this summer (7/2-7/3/2009) at Taichung, Taiwan. Here is a picture about the workshop.



In the morning, after a brief introduction on the chemical bonding and a few simple molecular structures, I then started to teach student the platonic solids and basic weaving techniques by asking them to make a C20 (a dodecahedron). I simply asked students follow my instructions step by step without too much explanation. This is because, I think, it is important to have some hands on experience for constructing beaded fullerenes first. Some students can get the basic rules of weaving just after a few steps, others may take a longer time and kept asking me how to do the next step. But it took about an hour for all students to get the first project done. I also found that it is better to use larger beads around 10mm to 12 mm for students who have no experience in beading. To create a C20, one need 30 beads. So it is not too expensive even for a group of 50 students.

The next project in the afternoon was to construct a C60. Of course, before we started to do that, I explain the icosahedron, truncated icosahedron and a few background information on fullerenes to them. Unlike C20, where all atoms and bonds are equivalent, here we have two different bond types, 5-6 and 6-6 bonds, so it is natural to use two different color of beads for the construction. In fact, this is not a burden for weaving. Instead, color of beads can be used as a mnemonic aid for denoting the place of pentagons. One needs 90 beads to represent chemical bonds in a C60. Since students have some experience in the morning for making a C20, I find it convenient and more cost effective to use 6mm beads with two different colors for students to work on in this project. It took about 2 hours for most of students to construct his or her C60.


The picture shown below is the C60 I made in this workshop. At the end, I gave it to one of students in this workshop as a souvenir.


3 comments:

niel said...

nice job ya..i like it(",)

Ljubica said...

where can I find free patterns for these molecular shapes?Or any payable pattern

thebeaedmolecules.blogspot.com said...

The simple fullerenes without any hole can be constructed by spiral (weaving) codes as described somewhere in this blog.

Donut-shape fullerenes (only hole or genus=1 if you are mathematician) have also been described in detail in this blog.

Other topologically nontrivial structures are more difficult to describe, though. But I believe that you can find hints in this blog too.