Does invention belong in the chemistry classroom? This article attempts to answer this question by describing how invention education first took root in a chemistry class at Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, NJ, and then expanded to other students with diverse interests to find a solution to two worldwide problems: satisfying the need for safe…

A class of 18 students attending the last year of an Italian high school was divided into groups and performed the extraction of pigments contained in hibiscus tea. Each group worked at a different temperature and carried out multiple extractions using distilled water as a solvent. By means of UV-vis spectroscopy it was possible to determine the…

Chemical escape rooms (ChEsRms) are educational games in which students use their brain, chemical knowledge, intuition, and a bit of luck to solve a mystery. At the Weizmann Institute, we have developed ChEsRms that are implemented by teachers in their classes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all the educational activities that took place in…

Transforming the chemistry curriculum to an interdisciplinary perspective is essential for preparing students to meet interdisciplinary career demands and to brace themselves for the challenges of complex environmental and health issues. The study introduces four interdisciplinary electrochemistry STEM-lab activities as an alternative to the…

Herein we present a modified iodine clock experiment which replaces starch with cellulose paper. This provides the reaction with a white solid surface in which color change can be clearly observed and reduces reagent amounts required to 540 µL per group. After data acquisition, students are required to calculate reaction orders and the reaction…

Here, we present an interdisciplinary educational project intended for high school chemistry that is focused on the establishment of a mathematical model to describe the relationship between conductivity and concentration, while linking chemistry to mathematics with the help of computer software. The project was designed to help high school…

This paper reports the development of a digital escape room for high school students using Genially, a web-based media platform. The escape room was used to aid understanding of basic concepts in chemistry and mostly enhance students' classes participation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The activity entitled "The thalidomide mystery"…

We report here a teacher action research project in which a Systems Thinking approach was implemented into a 15 h Depth Study for students in their final year of secondary chemistry. Students were introduced to the concept of Systems Thinking and the use of systems maps, along with the United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development…

The solution of simple kinetic equations is analyzed without referencing any topic from differential equations or integral calculus. Guided by the physical meaning of the rate equation, a systematic procedure is used to generate an approximate solution that converges uniformly to the exact solution in the case of zero, first, and second order…

How can we help students develop an understanding of chemistry that integrates conceptual knowledge with the experimental and computational procedures needed to apply chemistry in authentic contexts? The current work describes ChemVLab+, a set of online chemistry activities that were developed using promising design principles from chemistry…

Stoichiometry has always been a puzzling subject. This may be partially due to the way it is introduced to students, with stoichiometric coefficients usually provided in the reaction. If the stoichiometric coefficients are not given, students find it very difficult to solve problems. This article describes a simple 4-h laboratory experiment for…

Educating future scientists and citizens is more effective if students are guided to correctly apply what they learned in school to their daily lives. This experience-based work is focused on the study of a well-known commercial product: cat litter. This material offers different starting points for a critical examination. Questions related to…

The increase in ocean acidity since preindustrial times may have deleterious consequences for marine organisms, particularly those with calcareous structures. We present a laboratory experiment to investigate this impact with general, introductory, environmental, and nonmajors chemistry students. For simplicity and homogeneity, calcite was…

This paper compares the performance of students at a high-performing U.S. public school (n = 64) on the advanced placement (AP) chemistry exam to their performance on the ChemQuery assessment system. The AP chemistry exam was chosen because, as the National Research Council acknowledges, it is the "perceived standard of excellence and school…

Studies in cognitive science have verified that working memory (where the brain solves problems) can manipulate nearly all elements of knowledge that can be recalled automatically from long-term memory, but only a few elements that have not previously been well memorized. Research in reading comprehension has found that "lecture notes with…