Exploring the Nanoworld with LEGO Bricks

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) for Nanostructured Materials and Interfaces has launched an effort to make the nanoworld accessible and comprehensible to everyone. This booklet is an important part of the effort. LEGO bricks provide a safe, inexpensive, and widely available means for modeling the materials and tools that are part of nanoscalescience and technology. Under Dean's leadership and with support from the MRSEC, a set of LEGO-based models has been created for informing readers about structures at the nanoscale, tools for probing these structures, and relationships between structures and their properties.