A two-axis solar tracker and its interactive kiosk were designed by an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty. The objective was to develop a publicly accessible kiosk that would facilitate the study of energy usage and production on campus. Tracking is accomplished by an open-loop algorithm, microcontroller, and ham radio rotator. Solar…

Developing students' scientific literacy requires teachers to use a variety of pedagogical approaches including video as a form of instruction. In addition, using video is a way of engaging students in science ideas not otherwise accessible to them. This study investigated the merit of video clips representing scientific ideas in a secondary…

National Research Council polices (NRC, 2012a, 2012b) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 (Pub. L. No. 114-145) call for educators to have active roles in teaching to achieve new goals and purposes for education. A high priority is teaching content knowledge and information fluency skills that will result in deep learning, higher…

Difficulties encountered by teachers in giving a definition of the term "energy", and by students in grasping its actual meaning, reflect the lengthy process through which the concept eventually came to maturity around 1850. Tracing the history of this process illuminates the different aspects covered by the term and shows the important…

Baking cakes with different recipes can provide an exercise in the application of the scientific method, illustrating the need to vary only one ingredient at a time for correct derivation of conclusions. This experiment, most likely to be performed at home, compares a cake flour with flours from durum wheat, rice and cornflour (gluten-free…

We propose an experiment for investigating how objects cool down toward the thermal equilibrium with their surroundings. We describe the time dependence of the temperature difference of the cooling objects and the environment with an exponential decay function. By measuring the thermal constant t, we determine the convective heat-transfer…

Both Lavoisier and Priestley were committed to the role of experiment and observation in their chemistry practice. According to Lavoisier the physical sciences embody three important ingredients; facts, ideas, and language, and Priestley would not have disagreed with this. Ideas had to be consistent with the facts generated from experiment and…

The objective of our program is to foster and facilitate authentic research experiences in middle and high school science courses. We do so by providing students with a complete experience in scientific experimentation and communication. The centerpiece is a set of experiment modules in which students investigate the effects of toxic chemicals on…

The aim of this laboratory exercise is to present a high school hands-on laboratory experiment, focused on obtaining and investigating the properties of various polymorphic forms of aluminum oxide. Amphoterism plays a key role when discussing the law of periodicity and periodic changes of acid-base properties of elements and their compounds. In…

The classic technique for sulfate analysis in an undergraduate quantitative analysis lab involves precipitation as the barium salt with barium chloride, collection of the precipitate by gravity filtration using ashless filter paper, and removal of the filter paper by charring over a Bunsen burner. The entire process is time-consuming, hazardous,…

Interdisciplinary experiments are being offered in upper-division chemistry laboratory courses in an attempt to encourage students to make a connection between techniques learned in one discipline to affirm chemical principles that form the basis of chemical reactions in another chemistry discipline. A new interdisciplinary experiment is described…

Arsenic is a toxic element to which humans are primarily exposed through food and water; it occurs as a result of human activities and naturally from the earth's crust. An experiment was developed for a senior level analytical laboratory utilizing an Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) for the analysis of arsenic in household…

A laboratory experiment is described in which students measure the amount of cetirizine in allergy-treatment tablets based on molecular recognition. The basis of recognition is competition of cetirizine with phenolphthalein to form an inclusion complex with ß-cyclodextrin. Phenolphthalein is pinkish under basic condition, whereas it's complex form…

An experiment seated in an industrial context can provide an engaging framework and unique learning opportunity for an upper-division physical chemistry laboratory. An experiment that teaches NMR/MRI through a problem-based quality control of citrus products was developed. In this experiment, using a problem-based learning (PBL) approach, students…

College chemistry faculties might not have considered including isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) in their majors' curriculum because experimental data from this instrumental method are often analyzed via automation (software). However, the software-based data analysis can be replaced with a spreadsheet-based analysis that is readily…