Latest articles, blogs, and events from the chemical education community

Gentle Reader, our story today follows a number of storied histories, most conspicuously in the representation of transformation—making and breaking bonds—in a chemical reaction. Flowcharts, which use arrows to dynamically illustrate a process, also have a storied history, particularly in programming in Computer Science. Titrations have a stor

Helping the Next “Gen” of Chemistry Rockstar Teachers! 

In January 2020, as my 9th-period honors chemistry class kicked off, my students playfully challenged me to join TikTok, an app that I was only vaguely familiar with. Never one to back down from a challenge posed by my students, I decided to call their bluff and over the weekend I downloaded the app and began exploring it.

Gentle Reader, forgive me if the title - Connecting Acid-Base and Redox Connections (CABARC) - is redundant, but the connections between acid-base and redox reactions already exist, and it is my hope that we as instructors can parlay these connections into easier, better, and deeper understanding of both topics.

March Madness isn't just for basketball fans! With a little twist, Chemistry teachers can bring the excitement of this tournament into their classrooms. In this blog post, I'll outline our annual engaging March Madness-inspired project where students create persuasive presentations on the deadliest chemical elements.

Co-Authored by Dean J. Campbell*, Rhiannon Davids*, Ian Smith,* and Karl Jung* *Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois

This year, I tried something different with my course progression - instead of doing chemical quantities first and teaching students to convert from grams to mole and then move into stoichiometry, I began with mole to mole stoichiometry and BCA tables.

The “Pharaoh’s Serpent” chemical reaction involves the thermal decomposition of mercury (II) thiocyanate:^1,2

A major scientific event that occurred in the 1990’s was the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. While many will link the telescope with identifying and studying deep space objects, it also has strong aspects of chemistry. The Hubble space telescope has two spectrometers on it: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) that was installed in 1997, a

My students have always struggled with nomenclature. Even at the end of the unit, I had students mixing up the roman numerals with the molecular prefixes and they would give answers such as Copper Monoxide (II) or Mononitrogen (III) trihydride (I). I decided to try a new approach this school year.

Abstract: This post describes a simple device used to demonstrate and clarify some challenging concepts in thermodynamics at the General Chemistry level.