Laboratory Instruction

Especially JCE: July 2017
// Sunday, July 16, 2017 • Erica K. Jacobsen
How can a student show what he or she has learned in a laboratory? The way that might first pop into your head is the lab report. It is a tangible, written record of an experiment’s results that can easily be marked for presence of procedure, data, analysis, etc. But what about the processes that occur during the lab itself?
Do you have a favorite acid-base titration lab?
// Saturday, March 11, 2017 • Allison Tarvin
HCl and NaOH, a strong acid - strong base titration? Citric acid and NaOH, a weak, triprotic acid - strong base titration? Do your students standardize the NaOH solution as a first step?
Dry ice in five different liquids
Dry ice in five different liquids
// Sunday, January 1, 2017 • Tom Kuntzleman
I recently posted a video on Twitter of an experiment my students were conducting in class. I thought I’d blog about the experiment, since it seemed to generate a lot of interest.
Cloud formed when dry ice is placed in water
The Dry-Ice-in-Water Cloud
// Sunday, December 4, 2016 • Tom Kuntzleman
Have you ever wondered where the cloud comes from when dry ice is placed in water? Consider the answer returned in my browser when I Googled the phrase “How does the dry ice cloud form”:
Smartphone spectrophotometer
Use Your Smartphone as an "Absorption Spectrophotometer"
// Wednesday, March 30, 2016 • Tom Kuntzleman
A smartphone can be used in a remarkably simple and inexpensive way to teach your students about absorption spectroscopy and Beer’s Law. In short, light reflected off of colored construction paper is passed through a sample and detected by an RGB application on a smartphone.
Dec 2015 JCE
Especially JCE—December 2015
// Thursday, December 17, 2015 • Erica K. Jacobsen
Think it’s possible to get nostalgic over paperwork? I just did, spurred by editor-in-chief Norb Pienta’s editorial Thinking about Champions in the December 2015 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education.
Seeing Is Not Believing
// Monday, June 2, 2014 • Erica K. Jacobsen
“It sort of started to look kind of like a very pale blue.”