The curriculum is organized around two connected themes:
- Theme One: How it works. The fundamentals — transistors, the semiconductor phenomenon, and logic gates — building the conceptual base for understanding how an integrated circuit thinks.
- Theme Two: How it's made. The manufacturing process — how a single microscopic on-off switch scales up into a chip with millions of them — aimed at students who might see their future in engineering and manufacturing rather than design.
What Students Will Build
- A transistor you can hold. Students assemble a tangible, sensor-equipped transistor model — complete with a working P-node and N-node — that doesn't just look like a transistor, it functions like one.
- Logic gates, built by hand. Individual transistor models snap together the way real transistors connect on a chip, letting small groups of students physically construct AND, OR, and XOR gates — and eventually a working half-adder built from up to 12 transistor models.
- A "magic lens" for the makerspace. A custom AR app turns an ordinary headset into a magnifying glass: point it at a drill press or another everyday tool, and it reveals the semiconductor components hidden inside — turned into a friendly competition to see who can spot the most.
- A trip through the fab. A VR experience carries students, first-person, through five scenes of a semiconductor factory — watching the half-adder they designed by hand get turned into a real manufactured product.
How We're Building It
Phase | Timeline | Focus |
I — Understand | Year 1 | Co-design sessions with middle schoolers, teachers, makerspace hosts, and families to map current knowledge, needs, and gaps; early testing with 3D-printed transistor probes |
II — Build & Pilot | Years 2–3 | Iterative development of the tangible toolkit and AR/VR experiences; pilot workshops at partner makerspaces to refine content and pacing |
III — Deploy & Share | Years 3–4 | Full workshop deployment across sites, evaluation of learning outcomes, educator professional development, and open-source release of the full curriculum and toolkit |
Community Partners
SILICON is being co-designed with the Rockville Science Center, WestGate Academy, and the KID Museum, alongside the Iribe Initiative for Inclusion and Diversity in Computing and a semiconductor researcher from UC Santa Barbara. Once finalized, the curriculum and toolkits will be open-sourced and shared nationally through the MakerUSA network — so any community makerspace, not just our partner sites, can run a SILICON workshop.
Who We Serve
SILICON is built for students who are rarely given an early on-ramp to semiconductors: underserved middle schoolers, with a particular focus on lower-income African American, Hispanic, and female students. Every element of the curriculum — from the co-design process to the choice of an informal, community setting — is designed to make semiconductor science feel personally reachable, not reserved for someone else.