Practical experiments enhance students' understanding of basic concepts and promote deep learning experiences in chemistry. The smartphone application of Lab4Chemistry was utilized to replace colorimeters with smartphone camera sensors. Low-cost and readily available materials, including anthocyanin (fresh red cabbage) and common kitchen…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable strides in recent years, finding applications in various fields, including chemistry research and industry. Its integration into chemistry education has gained attention more recently, particularly with the advent of generative AI (GAI) tools. However, there is a need to understand how teachers'…

This paper describes a digital application designed for learning Space Groups of Symmetry (SGS). It teaches how to recognize the operations performed by the symmetry elements, both point (or 2D) operators (proper and improper rotations, including mirroring, inversion, and other rotoinversions), and space (or 3D) operators (screw axes and glide…

In this study, we analyzed how general chemistry students generated experimental designs corresponding to general chemistry questions such as the ones typically found in general chemistry textbooks. We found that students were very successful in including experimental design aspects that were explicitly mentioned in the general chemistry…

The process of diffusion is intimately related to random molecular displacement and is central to many problems in chemistry. Here, we provide an intuitive derivation of the diffusion equation based on the analysis of the random trajectories of particles generated and plotted by simple MATLAB and Python scripts. The codes are very simple and…

In today's global economy, the origin of the food we eat is becoming more and more difficult to identify. Verifying the authenticity of products to protect supply chains is a complicated problem that requires a multidisciplinary approach. Chemical authentication of foodstuffs often includes a mass spectrometer detector; however, they are costly…

Calculating analytical uncertainties as a part of method validation is a relevant aspect of field and laboratory practices in instrumental analytical chemistry subjects, which usually require complex algorithms. This work describes the development and didactic use of an automatic and straightforward informatics tool, implemented in an Excel macro,…

Students in an upper-level physical chemistry course utilized an open-sourced statistical software package to construct models fitted to experimental pressure-volume data. In the first part of the experiment, students familiarize themselves with model fitting. In the second part of the experiment, students determine which truncated version of the…

We developed a single crystal X-ray crystallography experiment based on the crystal structure of sucrose (table sugar), and a more challenging experiment using Epsom salt. Both crystals are readily available in X-ray quality crystalline form. In these experiments, students mounted a crystal on a MiTeGen loop and analyzed it using a Rigaku XtaLAB…

Solution equilibria diagrams are excellent tools for understanding chemical speciation in multireaction chemical systems. They are usually plotted using software packages that efficiently perform advanced calculations, giving the possibility to graphically visualize thermodynamic and composition information. However, this approach frequently…

Chemical solubility and equilibria are paramount for understanding everyday systems. Recent events have led to more interest by the general public in chemical equilibria that occur in drinking water systems. This presents a great opportunity to increase student interest and engagement in the more complicated aspects of chemical equilibria. Shiny…

The rise of virtual and online education in recent years has led to the development and popularization of many online tools, notably three-dimensional (3D) models and augmented reality (AR), for visualizing various structures in chemical sciences. The majority of the developed tools focus on either small molecules or biological systems, as…

The application of chemistry concepts in biological settings plays an important role in the interdisciplinary field of drug discovery and development. This is true for molecular docking, where an understanding of intermolecular forces and noncovalent interactions is useful for rational drug design and development. Here we report the design and use…

Laboratory automation and data science are valuable new skills for all chemists, but most pedagogical activities involving automation to date have focused on upper-level coursework. Herein, we describe a combined computational and experimental lab suitable for a first-year undergraduate general chemistry course, in which these topics are…

Density functional theory (DFT) is indubitably the most popular and among the most successful approaches for approximately solving the many-electron Schro¨dinger equation. The level of understanding on the part of both researchers and students using DFT, however, is lacking, given the availability of black-box software. The present work addresses…