Concepts relating to enzymes and energy are central to understanding chemical and biological processes at the molecular level. Student learning of these crosscutting concepts can be challenging, so it is important to identify misconceptions and remediate them early, especially in introductory classes. Here we describe an activity in which…

Millions of people do not have access to clean drinking water; thus, cost-efficient water treatment systems are vital. Chemists, environmentalists, technicians, and engineers will be the professionals making breakthroughs in this industry. This laboratory experiment aims to introduce undergraduate students to the removal of pollutants from water…

A laboratory experiment that exposes students to fundamental concepts in kinetics and statistical thermodynamics to study systems of great current interest in nanotechnology by employing a foundational technique in physical chemistry is described. A modified commercial flash photolysis spectrometer was used to study photoinduced isomerization…

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…

This paper provides seven topics on sodium hydrogen carbonate (NaHCO[subscript 3]) and its ions for readers looking for familiar material phenomena to strengthen students' understanding of the chemical concepts of thermodynamics. The first concept is the ideal gas law, followed by the van't Hoff equation, Gibbs energy, pH change, chemical…

Physical and virtual labs have unique capabilities that can influence how students learn from them. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of physical and virtual manipulatives on students' learning of heat and temperature and to examine the influence of various combinations of physical and virtual manipulatives. A total of 205…

This study has proposed a simple method to show the convective heat transfer. The object in this study is an air conditioner (AC) as a simple case of convection. In addition, AC is also easy to find in the class because most classrooms in Indonesia installed AC. Usually, a visualization needs special software (i.e. MatLab or others) and good…

A newly developed laboratory learning program for high school chemistry courses is discussed, in which students discover the chemical mechanism governing exothermic phenomena during the reaction between a heating agent, namely, calcium oxide (CaO)--aluminum (Al) mixture, and water. Based on prior knowledge of simple heating agents such as CaO, the…

In this paper, we show a laboratory experience describing the possibility to build a sensor using a coil to measure small thicknesses of materials with the possibility of measuring temperature simultaneously, with the same built sensor. Its operation is based on the following facts: An electric current (a.c), flows through a coil and a magnetic…

The Hofmeister series is a recurring trend that ranks ions' abilities to influence various aqueous processes in solution. Herein, a set of project-based experiments was developed for students in an upper-level physical chemistry laboratory to investigate the specific ion effects on the thermodynamics of caffeine partitioning between aqueous and…

Water exhibits a maximum in density at normal pressure at around 4° degree temperature. This paper demonstrates that during cooling, at around 4 °C, the temperature remains constant for a while because of heat exchange associated with convective currents inside the water. Superficial approach implies it as a new anomaly of water, but actually it…

The effect of surfactant adsorption on surface tension, as well as associated thermodynamic concepts are introduced in a laboratory experiment designed for undergraduate students. Using a reliable and accessible method, students measure the surface tension of aqueous solutions at different concentrations of sodium dodecyl sulfate. Students collect…

We have developed a laboratory project in which students prepare liposomes, expose them to hyperosmotic and hypoosmotic solutions, and follow the resulting shrinking and swelling (respectively) with laser light scattering. Each light intensity transient can be fit to an exponential decline or rise, with the decay constant (k) and the amplitude…

This work describes a simple experiment to measure the resistor temperature as a function of the applied power and proves that it is an efficient way to introduce some important physical concepts in classroom, including the Joule's first law, hot-spot temperature, thermal resistance, thermal dissipation constant, time constant and the Newton's law…

Project-based learning has been shown to be an effective pedagogical strategy that motivates students and thus promotes learning. In this article we describe a project-based unit centered on the physics of solar cookers (Fig. 1 and 3). Our goal was to elevate the solar cooker from a summer camp activity to a college-level project that could be…