manipulatives

Despite its miniscule molecular weight, the volatile plant hormone ethylene, C₂H₄, a monounsaturated hydrocarbon, plays an exceedingly important role as a ripening agent in horticulture (1).

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.

You don't have to be a Modeler (i.e., a teacher who practices Modeling Instruction) to appreciate the utility of particle diagrams. Many chemistry teachers use models and diagrams to help students describe how matter behaves at the particle level.

With the uncertainty of what the upcoming school year will bring, I have been planning as if my classes were completely online. Even during remote instruction, I want activities to be interactive for my students to allow them to engage with the material.

How many of you could recite, word for word, a definition you learned in school? When you first memorized the definition, you could state “inertia is a property of matter”, or “density is mass over volume”. However, you struggled to apply it to a new situation and maybe you were unsure of how to construct a model of what it meant.

In January of 2017, Chad Hustings wrote a blog post, Isotopes, Nuts, Bolts and Eggs, about an activity some colleagues and I had shared in a workshop at BCCE in 2016.

As I began to prepare my labs for this upcoming year, I decided to put a bit of a twist on a previous density of a block lab I had used in the past entitled the Measurement Challenge that is sold by Flinn Scientific.

Collaborative activities are becoming increasingly prevalent in classroom instruction. Often, when instructors start to incorporate collaborative activities in their instruction, they also start “flipping” the classroom.