As part of their third-year general chemistry program, students at the University of the Côte d'Azur are taught the basics of radioactivity. The view that third-year university students have of the periodic Table of the Elements is often reduced because it ignores the vast majority of isotopes. As part of this program, a practicum devoted to the…

Ion transport, involving the diffusion and migration of ions within the electrolyte, stands as a fundamental concept in electrochemistry and serves as the driving force for electrochemical reactions. Electric double layers are critical in the fields of electrochemical energy storage and chemical conversion, constituting a central focus of…

Although diffusion is the subject of beginning chemistry classes, there are a variety of experiments, such as the spread of perfume in the classroom, that are often "incorrectly" explained by diffusion alone. To eliminate this common misconception, a recently published method is modified to determine the diffusion constant of hydrogen…

The area near the electrode surface is called the diffusion layer, and to understand electrochemistry, it is crucial that students have a knowledge of the phenomena occurring at the diffusion layer. Here, we present a demonstration and activity to visualize and analyze the expansion of a micrometer-sized diffusion layer. The electrode process…

The concept of relative density is introduced in the middle school and high school curricula by an intuitive approach based on the phenomena of immersion and flotation. In high school, the same concept is taught as the ratio between the masses of two bodies of the same volume. This dichotomy of the concept of relative density between the two…

We report an educational tool for the upper level undergraduate quantum chemistry or quantum physics course that uses a symbolic approach via the PySyComp Python library. The tool covers both time-independent and time-dependent quantum chemistry, with the latter rarely considered in the foundations course due to topic complexity. We use quantized…

Fundamentals of Macroscopic Chemical Analysis is a newly developed foundation-level course that integrates concepts from traditional physical and analytical chemistry courses. The course was designed to serve majors in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology as well as pre-health professional students. The main goal of this course is to develop the…

The time-resolved detection of very low intensity light emission has become an essential capability in many areas of science including molecular biology, fluorimetry, DNA sequencing, virus detection, nanoparticle research, and optical materials development. Among the most basic techniques for the detection of rapidly fluctuating low-intensity…

Given the growing prevalence of computational methods in chemistry, it is essential that undergraduate curricula introduce students to these approaches. One such area is the application of machine learning (ML) techniques to chemistry. Here we describe a new activity that applies ML regression analysis to the common physical chemistry laboratory…

Keto-enol tautomerism is a fundamental concept that examines the migration of a proton between two constitutional isomers, the keto and enol tautomer. Many experiments have been proposed to understand the concept behind Meyer's Rule, which states that the keto tautomer is favored as the solvent polarity increases. However, all the experiments have…

Nowadays, technologies involving nanoparticles, colloids, sensors, and artificial intelligence are widespread in society, media, and industry. It is thus mandatory to integrate them into the curricula of students enrolled in chemistry and materials science. To this purpose, we designed a simple assay for the detection of glutathione (GSH) using…

We present a tool, one that is both a stand-alone web-based video game and a Python package, designed for students to explore a particle's wave function on one-dimensional potential surfaces. The tool relies on a basis set formalism and can, therefore, explore any one-dimensional potential surface imaginable. This tool also lets students interact…

Seeking to foster the learning process and encourage the active participation of undergraduate students, this work proposes a new methodology that involves integrating smartphones into the learning process under a simple and accessible approach to learning in Chemistry and Physics laboratories aiming at facilitating the learning of some chemical…

The prompt transfer of cutting-edge science into students' curricula is a challenging task. Often research experiments are too complex or expensive to be translated into a secondary or tertiary education setting. Herein, we introduce a laboratory experiment that translates the recently developed research technique of a wavelength dependent,…

Italian high school students carried out some activities within career guidance actions organized by the Department of Chemistry of Sapienza University (Rome) in order to promote enrollments in a chemistry Bachelor's course, thus remedying the shortage of professional chemists. Novel didactic sequences have been designed to facilitate the…