Microscopy is an excellent laboratory tool for teaching science and engineering topics in a high school environment, and is used extensively for biological classes. However, the potential for using microscopy to expose high school students to the field of materials science has not been exploited fully. This is, in part, due to the difficulty of designing suitable experiments within the budget, safety and equipment constraints of a typical high school laboratory.
These limitations are particularly severe for metallurgical experiments, and the net result is that most high school students have no exposure at all to topics in metallurgy. The objective of this project was to design a simple, safe, cheap experiment on eutectic solidification in metals that could be used to teach phase diagrams in high schools.
