(494c) A Product Design Workshop for Chemical Engineering and Chemistry K-12 Outreach

Many prospective college students have difficulty articulating the difference between chemistry and chemical engineering, and some even hold the misconception that they are the same discipline. To help students better understand the types of questions and approaches used by chemists and chemical engineers, we have developed a high-school outreach workshop demonstrating the intersection of science and engineering in the context of development of a personal care product. Our six-hour module is divided into three sessions, each approximately two hours. In the first session, students learn about how lotions interact with the skin and how different types of ingredients influence the final product’s affective qualities. Later, students examine commercially available lotions and develop focus group questions. In the second session, students design a natural (non-petroleum) lotion and then implement their recipe to make a small amount of lotion in a chemistry lab. In the final session, students sample and rate each other’s product using their focus group questions from session one. Following assessment of the subjective qualities of their lotions, students test viscosity, a quantitative factor, using a rotational viscometer. Finally, students are challenged to think about how to make their lotion in bulk quantities efficiently and given examples of how chemical processes can be scaled-up. The workshop is designed to mimic the process of designing a personal care product, emphasizing stakeholder input, formulation, testing (both affective and quantitative), and iteration. Additionally, the workshop is designed to be presented by both a chemist and a chemical engineer to highlight the role of each discipline in the process of bringing a product to market. We will share details of materials we selected for our lotions, possible alternatives, a summary of our experiences running the workshop, and ways that the workshop could be altered to meet the outreach needs of educators at other institutions.