In 2012, the National Research Council and the American Chemical Society criticized many graduate education programs in the chemical sciences for not adequately preparing graduate students for the interdisciplinary careers that they will likely occupy. These and other reports anecdotally suggest that soft skills, broad versus specific knowledge,…

A bridge course intended to ease the transition from Organic Chemistry I to II was designed for a January term that spans 2 weeks and features sharply focused topics courses. In the first week, key topics from Organic Chemistry I are revisited to ensure that students have a firm foundation on which to build. During the second week, a selection of…

Inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) is one of the most commonly used analytical techniques for the measurement of metals in environmental matrices. However, one of the drawbacks of ICP-OES is interference, viz., spectral and nonspectral (due to transport effects) interference. In this simple laboratory experiment,…

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a need for social distancing measures in public spaces and will have an important impact on university level teaching going forward. Remote methods to complete laboratory related activities are a potential means of students achieving practical credit while still isolating or social distancing. We outline the…

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, most universities and colleges have moved all instruction temporarily online, including the instruction of chemistry laboratory courses. Teaching laboratory courses online while keeping students engaged is challenging and often leads to presenting prerecorded lab demonstrations, lab animations, or virtual…

Since the sudden emergence of COVID-19 global pandemic, all educational institutions have looked to move resources and delivery online. Some institutions had already embraced delivering instruction in this way; however, broader adaptation to this teaching style is new to many educators. While the teaching of theoretical concepts is more easily…

The spring of 2020 saw the spread of COVID-19 throughout the world, and in response many colleges and universities moved to emergency remote instruction. Herein is described how an introductory chemistry course that prioritizes active learning and collaboration was adapted for emergency remote learning. Instructors used both asynchronous and…

Students used an Excel spreadsheet and a Jupyter notebook located at https://chemcompute.org/jupyterhub/ to generate data in lieu of face-to-face laboratory instruction during COVID-19. This communication discusses strengths and weaknesses of both exercises. First, students generated absorbance data using an Excel spreadsheet, but they were…

An escape room uses a game-based active learning approach to develop students' critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an immersive environment. An escape room was developed to provide an innovative method to reinforce concepts in chemical bonding for a first-year general chemistry course. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was…

The rapid transition in teaching format due to COVID-19 gives rise to many challenges, especially for research and lab activities since they may require a different approach with more constrained resources compared with lecture-based courses, in which various virtual communication platforms have now been employed. As essential parts for student's…

Loss of 7 weeks of organic chemistry laboratory work, including 3-4 weeks that would have been used for a CURE, prompted the creation of a literature review project in which students investigated synthetic routes to drug molecules of molecular weight 180 g/mol or less. The students wrote a 5-10 page paper and then made videotaped presentations…

In response to the Coronavirus-19 pandemic, higher education institutions quickly moved to emergency remote learning, and most human subjects research came to an immediate halt. Chemistry education researchers who wanted to continue data collection were confronted by many challenges, including research designs and data collection methods that had…

An introduction to the Quantum Chemistry Package (QCP), implemented in the computer algebra system Maple, is presented. The QCP combines sophisticated electronic structure methods and Maple's easy-to-use graphical interface to enable computation and visualization of the electronic energies and properties of molecules. Here we describe how the QCP…

A nonmajors general chemistry course entitled "Putting the Science in SciFi" was taught to 19 seniors at the College of the Holy Cross in 2018. The course coupled the delivery of content with experiential learning strategies in the form of writing assignments and hands-on activities. A pretest and posttest indicate that students gained…

An augmented reality (AR) application that complements a DNA precipitation experiment has been developed for use on mobile devices. The AR experience provides atomistic detail on the reasoning behind the experimental observations. The development of the application is described, as are the download data. In a pilot survey, the students were asked…