JCE ChemEd Xchange provides a place for sharing information and opinions. Currently, articles, blogs and reading lists from ChemEd X contributors are listed below. We plan to include other items that the community wishes to share through their contributions to ChemEd X.
The April 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: green chemistry; environmental chemistry; using food chemistry to teach; 2016 Jame Bryant Award; development of important skills; chemical education research: assessment; advanced laboratories; from the archives: water quality.
The James Bryant Conant Award was established in 1965 and has had several sponsors. The award is intended to recognize, encourage, and inspire outstanding teachers of high school chemistry. It is fitting that the Journal of Chemical Education and ChemEd X have established an endowment that will permanently fund the award. I think it is even more fitting that the 2017 Awardee, Laura Slocum, has a history with JCE as a precollege assistant editor from 2007 – 2011.
Each week I decided to put on paper, or in a blog, one concrete action that I could take that I was pretty sure would help at least one student. After almost three years and close to a hundred entries, the entries were separated into categories by multiple people. The result was pretty clear....my biggest struggles were with assessment.
The answer may be in the anecdotal evidence. The conversations between students were mini debates. “Are you sure this is correct?” “How do you know?” “What about this other data?” “Should we label that number?” “What about the energy of the particles during a phase change?” And on, and on, and on….They were having discussions between themselves that I would not have been able to elicit as a teacher.
The chemistry of the Sunflower dye found in McCormick’s Color from Nature food dyes is explored in this post. This is the last in a three-part series in which several experiments and demonstrations that can be done with Color from Nature food dyes are described.
According to the app store description, Chemical Formula Challenge is "An educational game to improve your ability to form chemical formulas from chemical names. You can either play it yourself or challenge a friend". The app features different levels of play such as easy, normal, and hard regarding the difficulty of the ions. As an example, beryllium chloride is considered "easy" while lead II nitride is considered "hard". The app then gives the user several ions to choose from and the user must then select the correct number of ions needed to balance the formula correctly.
The American Chemical Society will celebrate Earth Day on April 22, 2017. This year's theme is Chemistry Feeds Our World. I have gathered some resources related to food and cooking from ChemEd X in honor of the theme. I have also included links to other resources.
My students and I tend to have good experiences with a hydrate inquiry lab that I have "tweaked" (see the previous blog). Essentially, my students have some practice with hydrates in the lab and then they are provided an unknown hydrate. They must separate off the water by heating and calculate the mass of the anhydrous salt and container before they come up and put it on the scale. As an added twist, they must also ask me a question about what information they need from me to calculate the mole to mole ratio of the salt to water.
As our Gas Laws unit was coming to an end, it was time to create the test. As I thought of potential test questions that were both challenging and in alignment with the learning objectives we had previously identified for the unit, I was reminded of a multiple-choice question I had been shown in an old Modeling InstructionTM resource.
I was at a workshop recently, when a friend suggested I read, Chemistry: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Atkins, Oxford University Press. The friend suggested the book would not take long to read, and given the name included the phrase "A very short introduction" who was I to argue? So I bought the Kindle Version of the book for about $7 U.S. and got to reading.
