Blogs

A continuation of Counting Orbitals I: The 'Ah-ha! Moment' and Quantum Numbers. Sit back and adjust your eyeballs for some colorful graphics. 

Nora Walsh shares an overview of how she delivers content for her interactive notebooks during class. She includes a few video clips from her classroom showing a variety of ways to have students fill in their INB pages.

Flash rocks, typically pieces of quartz that produce light when struck together, are an example of the complex phenomenon of triboluminescence. The green chemistry aspects for the flash rock demonstration are considered, and LEGO models illustrating quartz crystals, piezoelectric materials, and nonpiezoelectric materials are presented.

You can solve Chemical Mystery #20 if you know your chemistry...and your magic!

Why does the "Whoosh Bottle" experiment behave differently at different temperatures?

Here is a great way to use spreadsheets to both collect student data and provide instant feedback during labs with quantitative data.

Continuation of the practical application of chemistry to seemingly something unrelated- global maritime trade. In this classroom activity students predict the buoyancy (and hence stability) of a merchant cargo ship based on interpretation of seawater surface salinity values. Like in the first three posts, the question types are conceptual. 

This is the third post in a series dealing with seawater chemistry and global maritime trade. This classroom activity introduces the concept of salinity and tasks students to predict the range of salinities in certain regions of the ocean (coastal and open water, all four hemispheres, high and lower latitudes). Enjoy...