This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an inquiry-based laboratory for sophomore-level organic chemistry into a mostly cookbook, existing laboratory curriculum. For the laboratory, students were required to generate their own procedures and use their own recorded data from prior laboratory assignments to identify an…

Water analysis is an excellent interdisciplinary topic for project-based learning. An undergraduate course was designed to engage the senior undergraduate chemistry students in a real-life experience. In this course, students developed methodologies based on published American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) methods for the measurement of…

An undergraduate-level Computational Chemistry project was incorporated initially into a Physical Chemistry course and then into the laboratory curriculum in the subsequent application. Before the introduction of the project, the lectures covered quantum chemistry, spectroscopy, and kinetics while simultaneously including computational chemistry…

Interactivity and inquiry-based learning science are effective ways of helping students overcome their perception of chemistry as an alien and abstract topic and instead approach the subject as a creative way of understanding ideas and applying mastered concepts to new contexts. Data acquisition systems are an extremely useful form of educational…

An experiment in chemical kinetics as part of our Discovery Chemistry curriculum is described. Discovery Chemistry is a pedagogical philosophy that makes the laboratory the key center of learning for students in their first two years of undergraduate instruction. Questions are posed in the pre-laboratory discussion and assessed using pooled…

Newton's cooling curve was chosen for the four-part laboratory inquiry into conditions affecting temperature change. The relationship between time and temperature is not foreseen by the average high school student before the first session. However, during several activities students examine the classic relationship, T = A exp[superscript -Ct] + B…