Middle tech: blurring the division between high and low tech in education

In 1997 the most prestigious high school science fair in the United States—the Westinghouse Science Competition [Berger 94] —was won by Adam Cohen, then a senior at Hunter High School in New York City. Cohen's project, "Near-Field Photolithography", involved the construction of a home-built scanning tunneling microscope (or STM—a high-resolution microscope that uses the extent of quantum tunneling between a metal "reading head" and a conducting surface to map the contours of the surface). To build his microscope, Cohen not only programmed a home computer, but also employed a wide variety of quirky materials. As he wrote, "The mechanical structure of the STM used in this study is made of Lego (a plastic building toy). The Lego provides a rigid structure and shields the sample from air currents.... To isolate against high frequency vibrations, the entire microscope is encased in about 7 kilograms of plasticine (a kind of modeling clay). Bungee cords suspend the microscope from the concrete ceiling to isolate the STM from low frequency vibrations."[Cohen 97]

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