Over the past several decades, green chemistry has gained prominence in chemistry education. However, the development of green chemistry curricula has not reached all levels of education equally, focusing mainly on elective and upper division courses. We deliberately focused our green chemistry curriculum redesign on a high enrollment introductory…

Purpose: In the 21st century, the importance of the fields of science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, and the need of the skilled individuals have paved a way for a great responsibility on teachers providing instruction in these four fields. Therefore, in this context, it is essential that teachers need to receive education for the…

Regioselectivity in hetero Diels-Alder reactions can be observed in a simple reaction between a nonsymmetrical heterodiene and an unsymmetrical heterodienophile. A 9 h and easy to implement laboratory experiment is described, in which students can observe the regioselectivity of inverse "electron-demand" hetero Diels-Alder reactions of…

Typical laboratory exercises for undergraduate organic chemistry students involve bulk phase reactions with work up of product. In this study, students performed accelerated versions of the Katritzky reaction of para-substituted anilines with pyrylium salts in three ways: (i) by dropcasting reagents onto a paper surface and allowing solvent to…

The ACS Guidelines for bachelor's degrees in chemistry call for the curriculum to include polymer chemistry principles and the synthesis of different classes of macromolecules. Organic chemistry can provide an important introduction to polymer chemistry principles, and photochemically induced radical polymerization is one method for generating…

Time-resolved luminescence lifetime measurements are an important photophysical technique. However, access to this technique at the undergraduate level is limited by the expense of the instrumentation needed to create the well-defined light pulses required to measure the luminescence decay of an excited state molecule. We present here an…

We built a low-cost and hand-held device to image and analyze microfluidic droplets mainly for educational/teaching purposes in laboratory settings of universities. The device was assembled based on a Raspberry Pi with a camera attached on the back and an LCD screen on the top. We evaluated the performance of this device to capture images and…

Two of the most fundamental skills that students acquire in introductory undergraduate physics laboratory courses are how to accurately plot data and interpret the physical meaning of linear graphs. We redesigned our graphing skills lab with an open-ended approach designed to promote inquiry in graphical analysis and to address specific areas of…

A low-cost time-resolved emission spectrometer optimized for ruby emission is presented. The use of a Class II diode laser module as the excitation source reduces costs and hazards. The design presented here can facilitate the inclusion of time-resolved emission spectroscopy with laser excitation sources in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum.…

Considering the large number of magnetic stirring hot plates that are damaged or unused in chemical laboratories, this Technology Report presents guidelines for students to be able to diagnose problems, and repair and maintain magnetic stirring hot plates using common and low-cost parts, or even repurposed materials. In addition, this paper…

When used effectively, laboratory courses can be very important for enriching teaching and learning. However, a review of many colleges and universities across the nation reveals that around 50% of the current Bachelor of Nursing programs have opted to remove (or possibly never included) the chemistry laboratory component. Authenticity is…

Laboratory exercises focused on protein quantification are frequently conducted in traditional undergraduate biochemistry laboratory curriculum. The laboratory course described here is designed to provide students with experience in measurement of protein content in milk powder by moving reaction boundary titration (MRBT), a new rapid technique…

Students in an upper-level physical chemistry course used a polarimeter to measure the molar optical rotation of different optically active amino acids to confirm the Clough, Lutz, and Jirgensons (CLJ) rule. This rule states that an amino acid is in the l-configuration if the molar optical rotation becomes more positive upon the addition of acid…

Recombinant protein expression and site-directed mutagenesis of target genes have demonstrated an increasing importance in the fields of molecular biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, and medicine. By using the flavodoxin of the model cyanobacterium "Anabaena" sp. PCC 7120 as a laboratory tool, we designed a comprehensive laboratory…

Current technology has the capacity for affording a virtual experience that challenges the notion of a teaching laboratory for undergraduate science and engineering students. Though the potential of virtual laboratories (V-Labs) has been extolled and investigated in a number of areas, this research has not been synthesized for the context of…