formulas

I’m not a fan of asking students to memorize rules or laws for the sake of memorizing rules or laws. There has to be a point—a reason, or at least a decent "this hits home” example of the rule or law. Stay with me . . .

"Who Poisoned Veronica Merriweather?" is a fun application of formula stoichiometry for students who are placed in the role of a CSI lab sleuth helping to interpret chemical data to identify a murderer.

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.

PART 1: Why this lab is no good For many years I was troubled by this commonly used, straight-forward, interesting-to-carry-out, and engaging experiment¹. This analytical, mole concept-based activity can be found in pretty much any chemistry lab manual, from Grade 11 to first-year university.

Writing formulas is one of those concepts in chemistry that requires much practice and repetition for students to gain confidence.

Determining the empirical formulas of ionic compounds based on charge balance is often a challenge for beginning chemistry students. Many visual aides have been developed for this purpose, from repurposing commercial interlocking bricks to custom 3-D printed bricks. This article describes yet another option– upcycled can carriers.

This activity is used as a reinforcement activity following my use of JCE Classroom Activity #113: An Interlocking Building Block Activity in Writing Formulas of Ionic Compounds. It could be used as a stand alone activity to support writing ionic formulas and names.