With the advancements in broad-spectrum sunscreens and the recent bans on benzene-based sunscreens due to their environmental toxicity, there has been a push toward broad-spectrum sunscreens containing in organic active ingredients. In this study, a procedure was developed to analyze the particle size and size distribution of inorganic active…

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are among the most common visualizations used by chemists in both academic and industrial settings, where they serve as both representations of submicroscopic entities and tools that support social discourse. The ability to use words to communicate about features within NMR spectra is thus an essential…

Small organic molecules offer a rich opportunity to discuss the interplay of chemical structure with properties such as the melting point and phenomena such as glass formation and can form the basis of fundamental considerations of structure-property relationships in macromolecules. Of particular importance are thermal transitions, specifically…

In selecting from a repertoire of traditional kinetics experiments, an instructor often has to choose among having students gain experience with the graphical method, the method of initial rates, or a temperature-dependent experiment in which students construct an Arrhenius plot. This paper presents an environmentally friendly bleaching reaction…

Low cost, open-source analytical instrumentation has the potential to increase educational outcomes for students and enable large-scale citizen science projects. Many of these instruments rely on smartphones to collect the data, mainly because they can effectively leverage a dramatic price-to-performance ratio of the optical sensors. However,…

In this study we examined the effectiveness of a mobile game called MathDash for improving computational fluency as compared to a conventional drill and practice approach with computerized multiple-choice test items. An optical brain imaging method called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) was utilized to assess changes in neural…

To help students develop an understanding of the proper use and function of spectrographs and monochromators we describe a student-assembled spectrograph using a "webcam" detector. The apparatus also works well as a low-cost demonstration, helping students make connections between an atomic spectrum observed by eye and a plot of the relative…