activity

As chemistry teachers, we often think about how we can make our subject “real world” for our students. We want them to be able to connect concepts to their lives, as we know that this increases not only their interest in the course, but also engages their prior knowledge and increases their long term retention of the concepts.

Each year I am truly excited when my honors classes are ready to learn the Quantum Mechanical Model (QMM) because this lesson was a crucial reason why I decided to become a chemistry major when I was in high school. I have always been in love with the periodicity of the elements and how clean and organized it all seems.

​Atomic theory is a common topic throughout any introductory chemistry course.

Good day, Gentle Readers: After a recent study of Intermolecular Forces, my AP Chemistry students experienced the joy of performing a microscale extraction of caffeine from tea.

A proficient understanding of the periodic table is indispensable for students studying chemistry. Chemical properties, bonding, and reactions are routinely explained using the trends and patterns of the periodic table.

When the COVID pandemic of 2020/2021is eventually eradicated and more colleges resume in-person laboratory instruction again, many instructors will face the daunting reality that students entering upper-level chemistry classes may have little or no actual hands-on college lab experience having completed their general chemistry laboratory sequence throug

A case study is a guided inquiry activity that embeds problem-solving within a simulated real-world context. Case studies tend to be more challenging than traditional word problems because they are presented in a longer form, commonly as a story.

As a follow-up to the first two activities (Part 1 and Part 2) using paper tools to introduce

To help introduce students to organic nomenclature in a way that clearly summarizes the patterns that exist in the IUPAC system, a series of paper tools were developed. The paper tool in this activity can be used to introduce the IUPAC naming of major classes of organic compounds.