The Wisconsin initiative for Science Literacy has published Science Climate Concepts Fit Your Classroom - A Workbook for Teachers. This is a free online Workbook, readily available for secondary teachers and college faculty. This workbook includes many hands on activities that incorporate traditional science classroom concepts within the context of climate science.
Learn how to thermochemically analyze the Devil's Milkshake chemical demonstration - just in time for Halloween!
Come explore the “Fire and Ice” pedagogic field laboratory. Follow suggested pathways and perspectives, or blaze your own trails. Visit for 10 minutes or for hours.
The Devil's Milkshake is a simple, yet interesting chemistry experiment that fits well as a Halloween demo.
If you are looking to go beyond using traditional, arguably misleading, definitions of entropy involving “disorder” and “messy bedroom” analogies, the Boltzmann Bucks game fits the bill. The game, pulled from a Journal of Chemical Education article, provides a wonderful opportunity for students to more accurately conceptualize entropy.
In an effort to align my lessons with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), I have tried to take the content I have traditionally taught, and shift the design to focus on student engagement with the science and engineering practices outlined in the standards. For the topic of heat transfer I re-packaged the ice melting blocks discrepant event as a NGSS investigative phenomena.
Each year we work on specific heat of materials and the heat of fusion of ice. These are two labs that are typical for most chemistry classrooms. Most of the experiments involve a simple calorimetry experiment that uses a styrofoam cup and provides generally good results. There tend to be a couple of key ideas with all of these experiments.
From the misconceptions fostered by the biology textbooks using the phrase “high-energy phosphate bond” to idea that energy comes in different forms, the Modeling community recognizes the challenges of teaching the energy concept and has developed a way of talking about energy designed to help students construct a consistent and cohesive model.
Have you ever thought about the ways we, as chemistry teachers, talk about the concept of energy?
I’d like to report on one of the end-of-year research projects that two of my general chemistry students completed during class this year. If you’d like read more about these end-of year research projects in general, click here.
