Note: This was originally an essay I wrote for my high school's robotics club. I modified the wording for the sake of my team's privacy. :)
Throughout the year 2022-203, my robotics team and I realized the importance of some of the stages in experiential learning. Although we did not intentionally try to use the cycle, we did realize that applying some of these stages were indispensable to facilitating forward thinking and innovation. For instance, during one of our meetings this year, the importance of concrete learning experience, the first stage of Kolb’s learning cycle, was highly emphasized as newer members considered entering our high school robotics team. Because of concrete, hands-on experience, these newer members got to immerse themselves in things like driver’s practice and robot mechanics in order to learn what it meant to be a part of our team. Likewise, during another one of our meetings, we extensively applied abstract conceptualization to make important deductions and plans; with abstract conceptualization, we were able to use the experience we gained from prior robotics competitions to comprehend the importance of installing odometry wheels to our robot to enhance its autonomous performance, as well as the importance of planning outreach activities to spread robotics to the next generation.
Noticing how useful these steps were to our Robotics team, I began to wonder: How exactly is hands-on learning used in-real life? How might experiential learning be used in the STEM field?
After researching the processes undergone in research papers and the STEM Field, I was able to observe that the recent discovery and creation of a new kind of ice called medium density amorphous ice parallels with the methods and stages outlined in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle.
An overview of the learning cycle:
Kolb’s learning cycle consists of four stages:
Concrete experience—This is the very act of doing or seeing something, thereby gaining concrete experience with the given topic.
Reflective observation—This is the act of analyzing what was just seen or experienced in the previous stage.
Abstract conceptualization—This is when one synthesizes conclusions, deductions, and new nuggets of knowledge from what had been observed.
Active experimentation—This is where learners plan and apply what they had just learned or conceptualized; this may be through the testing of a theory, the creation of a project, etc.
An Overview of Medium Density Amorphous Ice
While twenty different crystalline phases of water have already been discovered, little is known about amorphous phases of water, or phases of water that lack the crystalline structure specific to regular ice. Scientists were already aware of two types of amorphous ices: low-density amorphous ice, which could be created via the deposition of water vapor on a cold metal surface, and high-density amorphous ice, which could be created by compressing hexagonal ice crystals at low temperatures (essentially below a liquid’s glass transition temperature). This was why scientists became curious about an amorphous ice in the middle--- a medium density amorphous ice. It was not until scientists, on February 2nd, 2023, ball milled hexagonal ice crystals under low temperatures to get medium density amorphous ice, an ice with a molecular structure similar to that of liquid water, making the water appear frozen in time.
Applications of each of the stages in the Discovery of MDA Ice:
Each of the four stages of experiential learning were used in hypothesizing and ultimately creating and discovering medium density amorphous ice. Here’s how:
Concrete experience: The scientists who compiled the research on the discovery of medium density amorphous ice acknowledged their prior knowledge, or experiences, with the two amorphous ices they already knew—low and medium density amorphous ice. As a matter of fact, two of the authors of that paper, Christoph G. Salzmann and Alexander Rosu-Finsen, had previously collaborated on a paper about the structures and potential functions of amorphous ice and C60 fullerene on comets. They even incorporated two references about each of those amorphous ices in that paper, one called Structural Relaxation of Low-Density Amorphous Ice Upon Thermal Appealing and the other called Nature of the Transformations of Ice I and Low-Density Amorphous Ice to High Density Amorphous Ice. This indicates that these scientists were able to use concrete experience to jumpstart some of their research.
Reflective observation: With prior knowledge and experience about low and high-density amorphous ice, these scientists reflected on the gap between these two densities—the medium density. They themselves wrote that “this gap and the question if the amorphous ices have corresponding liquid states below a liquid-liquid critical point is a topic of great interest with respect to explaining water’s many anomalies,” further asserting that “the fact that amorphous ice is the most common form of ice in the Universe underpins the need to understand the structurally disordered states of H2O.” These scientists’ ability to find significance in prior knowledge and experiences with amorphous ices is indicative of the ability to apply reflective observation to provide incentive for the creation of MDA ice.
Abstract conceptualization: Remembering the importance of learning about the gap between the densities of low and high density amorphous ice, the scientists were able to brainstorm, or conceptualize, possible ways to create the ice that could fill that gap. Besides the deposition of vapor or the low-temperature compression of hexagonal ice crystals, the scientists were aware of another technique, ball milling, which was used to produce several other amorphous materials for metallic alloys and pharmaceuticals. They were able to use their reflections to conceptualize a new method of producing amorphous ices: ball milling hexagonal ice crystals at lower temperatures.
Active experimentation: After conceptualizing this new method, the researchers actually underwent an entire procedure in order to successfully ball mill ice to produce a medium density amorphous version of it—they cooled the grinding jar of the ball mill with liquid nitrogen, filled it with ice and steel balls, and shook it until the ice was ball milled. After eighty ball milling cycles, they produced an ice that had a density of 1.02 ± 0.03 g cm^-3, which is between the density of LDA (0.94 g cm^-3) and HDA (1.15 g cm^-3), thereby making it the MEDIUM density they were looking for. The many cycles it took to get MDA ice indicates active experimentation with ball milling.
Conclusion: The experiential learning process can be applied not just in high school STEM classes or clubs, but also more widely in key scientific discoveries, such as that of medium density amorphous ice. Concrete experience with LDA and HDA ices, reflective observation about the significance of finding the ice that filled the density gap between those two ices, abstract conceptualization of a new method of creating an amorphous ice, and active experimentation with ball milling were all shown to be essential to making this discovery. As a Robotics team that unconsciously applied experiential learning during the design process of our robot, we understood the importance of learning to apply hands-on problem solving both in and outside of our team.
References and Further Reading
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