In an era where technology is being used more and more in daily life, the potential and effective use of technology is becoming increasingly vital in education. Engineering education necessitates the use of technology to assist students in understanding abstract concepts and principles. Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that can be used to…

Dissection is a unique multisensory educational experience and is essential to learning the anatomical construction of the human and animal bodies. This study aims to introduce a specialized design for the assessment of dissection and to discuss the assessment's attributes. The design was a product of the "assessment drives learning"…

Ever since Newton's groundbreaking work on the composed nature of light, additive colour mixing (and its laws) are subject to the interest of physicists as well as other sciences. In this paper, we present a setup for simple lab or home experiments on additive colour mixing and the laws of colour mixing. Students use the screen of a laptop or…

A revised version of a traditional physical chemistry laboratory experiment has been developed to enhance student discussion in the laboratory and to improve students' connections between physical chemistry concepts and real molecular systems. In this experiment, students explore the keto-enol tautomerization of 2,4-pentanedione. However, unlike…

Anthocyanins are natural pigments belonging to the flavonoid family that generate the red, blue, and purple colors of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Their structure and color are dependent on various factors, like the pH. Anthocyanins appear red in acidic, purple in neutral, and blue in basic solutions, making them suitable for use as natural pH…

We provide a protocol for rapid DNA extraction from spiders suitable for undergraduate practical sessions. Students who were previously naïve to the theory and laboratory technique of DNA barcoding were successfully able to extract and recover 29 DNA sequences from 16 species of small spiders in the family Linyphiidae. We anticipate that with…

A set of inexpensive and pedagogically rich experiments focusing on S[subscript N]1, E1, and E2 reactions have been updated to include modern computational and spectroscopic analyses. The S[subscript N]1 experiment involves treatment of "tert"-amyl alcohol with hydrochloric acid to generate the corresponding alkyl chloride, which is used…

A laboratory experiment that involves the synthesis, characterization, and application exploration of a metal-organic framework (MOF) has been developed for first-year undergraduates in the Faculty of Engineering at National University of Singapore. The desired MOF material was prepared from commercially available reagents in a facile…

The synthesis of a commercial fragrance, methyl cinnamate, via Fischer esterification was evaluated for use as a second-year organic chemistry course. The experiment utilizes "trans"-cinnamic acid, a commercial flavoring that possesses a mild honey floral odor, as an inexpensive starting material. Both the starting material and the…

Biodiesel is an important biomass, largely employed in the transport sector and produced from vegetable oils. Additionally, waste cooking oils may be reused to produce biodiesel fuel, minimizing environmental pollution. A laboratory experiment that affords a widespread way to discuss degradation concepts and tools for used vegetable oil…

For conducting laboratory experiments on Fresnel diffraction, the use of a simple point light source from an LED and the application of a modern smartphone for photographing the diffraction patterns are proposed. The developed devices allow the experiments to be carried out under normal laboratory lighting.

When injecting dye into a vortex, one finds that the dye remains captured around the vortex core over minutes, despite the fact that the vortex (and the dyed region) is strongly time-dependent. According to a recent theory, three-dimensional time-dependent vortices should be defined as rotating, material-holding regions of the fluid. Vortices…

Carbohydrates are an essential group of molecules to the organic chemistry classroom providing molecular relevance to a common ingredient in chemical biology. While the meticulous elucidation of the carbohydrate structures by Fischer and others is an engaging topic in the lecture, there are few laboratory experiments that can emulate carbohydrate…

This communication describes a method to detect aluminum in gastric drugs by the naked eye using a microfluidic paper-based analytical device ([mu]PAD). Aluminum ions react with chrome azurol S (CAS) and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) to form a colored complex, which generates a colored band on the [mu]PAD. A printed ruler can be used to…

A continuous flow photopinacol coupling of benzophenone has been developed and implemented in the undergraduate laboratory. This photoreduction was accomplished using 2-propanol as an H atom donor and cosolvent in the reaction. The simple and inexpensive UV light source and flow reactor design (less than $350/photochemical flow system) provide an…