Students coming into science labs need initial and ongoing training about safety standards and best practices. They also need to develop good attitudes about their work and the health and safety of their teachers and fellow students. The "School Chemistry Laboratory Safety Guide" is a resource for science teachers and school administrators to help…

This experiment introduced general chemistry students to the basic concepts of organic structures and to the power of spectroscopic methods for structure determination. Students employed a combination of IR and NMR spectroscopy to perform de novo structure determination of unknown alcohols, without being provided with a list of possible…

Teaching physics concepts with the basic materials that are around us is one of the beauties of physics. Without expensive lab materials and long experiments, many physics concepts can be taught to students using simple tools. Demonstrations with these tools can be presented as discrepant events that surprise, amaze, or puzzle students. Greenslade…

As point-and-shoot digital camera technology advances it is becoming easier to image spectra in a laboratory setting on a shoestring budget and get immediate results. With this in mind, I wanted to test three cameras to see how their results would differ. Two undergraduate physics students and I used one handheld 7.1 megapixel (MP) digital Cannon…

This paper proposes a novel educational support system for technical experiments involving the production of practical electronic circuits for sound processing. To support circuit design and production, each student uses a computer during the experiments, and can learn circuit design, virtual circuit making, and real circuit making. In the…

The food industry uses different additives to give foods and beverages the appearance expected by the consumer. Among them, pigments of natural origin are receiving increasing attention due to safety concerns about traditional colorants and the relevance of a healthy diet. This experiment describes the quantitative determination of the…

An abundance of research confirms preservice teachers are unprepared to work with diverse populations. This article describes an education program's efforts to support diversity initiatives and provide information and hands-on training to prepare teacher candidates for future work with the diversity they will encounter. Explanations of programs,…

The experiments presented show the response of a liquid crystal shutter to applied electric voltages and the delay of the operations. Both properties are important for liquid crystal displays of computers and television sets. Two characteristics of the shutter are determined: (i) the optical transmittance versus applied voltage of various…

Students prepare a tertiary amine antifungal analog in an upper-level undergraduate organic laboratory. A microscale Petasis reaction is performed to generate a liquid compound readily characterized via IR and proton NMR spectroscopy. The biological relevance of the product is highlighted, with the tertiary amine scaffold being an important…

Traditional college campuses need to capitalize more effectively on the facts that they are a physical presence within a natural environment; that their presence plays host to many people working and living together in myriad formal and informal communities; that those communities are driven by educational, philosophical, economic, and…

In cart-pole balancing, one moves a cart in 1 dimension so as to balance an attached inverted pendulum. We approached perception-action and learning in this task from an ecological perspective. This entailed identifying a space of informational variables that balancers use as they perform the task and demonstrating that they improve by traversing…

An evaporator-type cryogenic heat exchanger is designed and built for introducing fluid-solid heat exchange phenomena to undergraduates in a practical and efficient way. The heat exchanger functions at liquid nitrogen temperature and enables cooling of N[subscript 2] and He gases from room temperatures. We present first the experimental results of…

LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots are being increasingly used in undergraduate courses, mostly in robotics-related subjects. But other engineering topics, like the ones found in data acquisition, control and real-time subjects, also have difficult concepts that can be well understood only with good lab exercises. Such exercises require physical…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to summarize and discuss the results from the LIVING LAB design study, a project within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union. The aim of this project was to develop the conceptual design of the LIVING LAB Research Infrastructure that will be used to research human interaction with, and stimulate…

Techniques are developed to find all periodic solutions in the simple pendulum by means of the homotopy analysis method (HAM). This involves the solution of the equations of motion in two different coordinate representations. Expressions are obtained for the cycles and periods of oscillations with a high degree of accuracy in the whole range of…