Course: Polymeric Materials Christopher Viney, School of Engineering
C
u
r
r
i
c
u
l
u
m
Professor ‘Stretches’ Creativity to Illustrate Difficult Concepts BY Lorena Anderson
University Communications
It’s not every day you see a university professor urging students to pull rubber bands and hold them to their lips. But the Polymeric Materials class gives Professor Christopher Viney – known around campus for his charismatic personality – a chance to demonstrate fun experiments that illustrate the concepts he’s teaching. “He encourages students to engage with the material and try to understand it conceptually rather than memorizing information,” said student Noel Cruz, who took the class in Fall 2013. “He advocates a multidisciplinary approach to learning. For example, the course focuses on polymers but we applied circuits, differential mathematics and organic chemistry concepts in order to gain a better grasp of the material.” Viney uses the rubber bands to demonstrate some of the thermodynamics associated with stretching the rubber, and he pairs the demonstration with a lecture on how you can predict the stress-strain relationship and the deformations that result. “It’s really physics at that point,” Viney said. Here’s how the experiment works: After convincing the students not to play with the rubber bands beforehand, Viney tells them to give their bands one quick, hard tug, then hold the stretched portion to their upper lips.
“It’s one example of how you can understand things you can’t see.” – PROFESSOR Christopher Viney
on his classroom experiment with rubber bands
“The stress makes the rubber crystallize – it essentially becomes a different material,” he said. The crystallization releases heat, which the students can feel on their lips. Then, they relax the bands, and as the crystals melt, the rubber absorbs heat from its surroundings. At that point, the bands feel noticeably cooler when the students hold them to their lips. “It’s one example of how you can understand things you can’t see,” Viney said. Viney is one of the campus’s original eight faculty members, and has held a variety of responsibilities over the nine years since the campus opened, including writing the original materials science and bioengineering curricula, devising the campus’s core curriculum with Professor Emeritus Gregg Herken and other colleagues, teaching freshman seminars, calculus and physics, and serving as vice provost for
undergraduate education for three years. He still mentors an Engineering Service Learning team, collaborates with colleagues and students on research, gives guest lectures and teaches. Cambridge educated, Viney is professionally recognized as both a physicist and a chemist, and taught at Oxford, Heriot-Watt University and the University of Washington before making his home in Merced. With all that experience, students say, Viney seems intimidating – at first. “He holds everyone to a high standard – a standard that, toward the end, we all hold ourselves to as well,” Cruz said. “But after a short while, it’s apparent that he has his students’ best interest in mind, because he goes out of his way to help them. In reality, he is a humble and kind-hearted professor.”
SPRING 2014 | UC MERCED MAGAZINE
3