This activity aims to boost students’ confidence in representing the atomic world. It also aims to educate both students and the general public about the “chemicals” found in everyday objects.
This post addresses concerns about the quality of the future of chemistry education in an online environment.
The many colors of springtime can be illustrated with photochromic pigments in commercial products. These products include UV beads, and more recently, photochromic glue. The glue can be used as a photochromic paint for paper or even eggs. The resulting colorful, decorative objects can be used to illustrate chemical discussions of aspects of photochemistry.
This classroom activity challenges students to figure out the volume of gaseous carbon dioxide emitted from the combustion of 1 gallon of gasoline fuel.
Collisions is a system of eight digital games, grounded in the rules of chemistry, that can be used to introduce, teach, and review more than 50 key concepts in your chemistry classroom. Collisions makes abstract concepts tangible by allowing students to visualize and manipulate the building blocks of matter, while providing a safe space to make mistakes and learn by introducing content through gameplay. On March 24th, 2021, Jen Lee presented a ChemEd X Talk about how instructors can use these games with their high school and college students. Besides explaining how the games work and interconnect, she outlined how to find and use premade lesson plans and answered questions posed by participants. You can watch the edited recording of Jen's Talk here.
If a student “gets the wrong answer” while performing mole conversions, it can be difficult (for both student and the teacher) to discern where an error was made. Inevitably sometime toward the beginning of learning these conversions, students can become overly confident, plugging numbers in without thinking about whether they are sensical. This card set slows students down to think about the order and purpose of each of the steps in mole conversions.
In this lab, students connect the workings of an electrochemical cell in the lab with the symbolic equations used in electrochemistry and manipulate a model representing the particulate level of what is happening during the electrochemical process. Although this lab was previously highlighted on ChemEd X, there are now virtual options offered!
Many of us have molecular kits we only use once a year. Dust them off and find new lessons to use them in!
Melissa Hemling shares her favorite manipulatives along with cheap at-home alternatives to help students visualize VSEPR.
This is an ongoing blog that will describe ACS governance news, insights, and important events and action items from the perspective of a new ACS Councilor.
