Semiconductor Informal Learning Initiative through Community-Oriented Networks using Tangibles and Mixed Reality
For most kids, the chip inside a phone or a game console really is magic — a sealed black box with no visible moving parts and no obvious story. Project SILICON exists to break that spell: to put the "magic" in students' hands, literally, and show them how it works.
The Challenge
Semiconductors are the foundation of nearly every modern device, and the CHIPS Act has made growing the domestic semiconductor workforce a national priority. Yet more than 100,000 domestic electronics industry jobs are projected to go unfilled in the coming years — a shortage rooted, in part, in how late semiconductor education begins. Talent pipeline efforts overwhelmingly start in college, while younger students — including middle schoolers who are just starting to form their sense of what science is and what they might do with it — rarely encounter the concept of a semiconductor at all.
It's easy to see why. A teacher can hold up a battery or wire a circuit and make electricity feel real. Semiconductors are harder: the physics happens at the atomic scale, inside a P-N junction no one can see, using processes like doping and lithography that sound more like science fiction than a school lesson. So while today's middle school curriculum touches on related topics — circuits, robotics — it rarely connects them to the semiconductor principles underneath, and the "how" behind students' everyday devices stays a black box.
Our Approach: Hands, Not Just Screens
SILICON makes the invisible visible through hands-on, embodied learning — the same principle at the heart of all of our lab's projects: understanding sticks best when students can touch it, build it, and move through it, not just watch it on a slide.
We're doing this through informal, community-based STEM learning, run as a series of after-school workshops in local makerspaces rather than inside a traditional classroom. That choice is deliberate. Makerspaces already surround students with tools, circuits, and hands-on culture; they give students room to talk science freely with peers and mentors without the pressure of a graded classroom; and — importantly — they let us invite families in as active participants, since parental involvement is one of the strongest known predictors of a child's early STEM interest.