Blogs

The September 17 AP Teach meeting focused on the 2026 AP Chemistry exam, emphasizing common student mistakes and strategies to improve performance. Participants were invited to share areas where their students struggled, providing a starting point for discussion about how classroom instruction and exam preparation might address those challenges.

Teachers new to AP Chemistry often feel overwhelmed as they design their course, with so many resources available and so much content to cover.  Veteran teachers looking to revise their course may also be unsure where to start.  In this APTeach session, we crowdsourced suggestions for developing or revamping your course as we start another academic year.

This article presents a microscale, green chemistry approach to the extraction and separation of phycocyanin and chlorophyll from spirulina, providing a visually compelling context for investigating molecular polarity, solubility, and intermolecular interactions. Designed for secondary and introductory undergraduate chemistry, the adaptable protocol uses accessible materials and can be extended to quantitative analysis through smartphone-based colorimetry and Beer-Lambert relationships.

Writing a strong AP Chemistry free-response question does not have to begin with a blank page. During the July APTeach session, teachers explored patterns in previously released AP questions, considered how prompts connect to scoring guidelines, and practiced adapting existing FRQs and multiple-choice questions to assess new topics.

What if your students could step inside a chemical reaction and watch the chemistry unfold? Project Genesis turns reactions into explorable 3D processes, inviting students to predict, play, investigate, and revise their thinking as molecules, bonds, and electrons come to life.

This Google Sheets lesson lets students practice atomic and ionic structure examples and receive instant feedback through conditional formatting rules. In this lesson, students fill in missing cells based on the number of protons, neutrons, electrons, element name, isotope notation, atomic number, mass number, charge, and hyphen notation. No prior knowledge of spreadsheets is required for students or teachers, but learning inside a spreadsheet is a great way to expose students to the capabilities of Google Sheets and Excel!

This blog post explores how Einstein’s theory of relativity helps explain some surprising properties of heavy elements, including gold’s yellow color and resistance to corrosion and mercury’s liquid state. It also examines how relativistic effects influence the chemistry of heavy and superheavy elements, revealing an unexpected connection between fundamental physics and the periodic table.

Buffers bring together many of the skills students develop throughout AP Chemistry, making them both an important and often challenging topic to teach. In this APTeach session, teachers came together to share strategies for helping students make connections among acid–base chemistry, equilibrium, stoichiometry, particulate-level representations, and pH calculations.

What if note-taking didn’t mean sitting quietly while the teacher lectured? In this article, Anthony Stetzenmeyer shares a nontraditional approach to classroom notes that gets students moving, interacting, and thinking. Inspired by Just in Time Teaching (JiTT), his strategy separates the act of collecting information from the process of making meaning, using posted guided notes, targeted “Notes Checks,” and short, data-driven mini-lessons. The result is a classroom structure that increases engagement, supports diverse learners, and transforms notes from a passive task into an active learning experience.

A simple demo to illustrate an induced dipole effect.