Energy drinks, as familiar consumer products, have been widely used in laboratory courses to help promote student interest, as well as to connect lecture concepts with laboratory work. Energy drinks contain B vitamins: pyridoxine (vitamin B6) and riboflavin (vitamin B2) of which amounts are high enough to be of concern. In this work, a fast and…

The Distributed Drug Discovery (D3) program trains students in three drug discovery disciplines (synthesis, computational analysis, and biological screening) while addressing the important challenge of discovering drug leads for neglected diseases. This article focuses on implementation of the synthesis component in the second-semester…

The laboratory course is one of the most critical classes in any engineering program. Engineering by its very nature is a practical discipline, and the laboratory course is usually the first and only class where students are given the opportunity to apply the knowledge they are gaining in lecture courses to real-world equipment. As chemical…

Background: University physics students were engaged in open-ended thermodynamics laboratory activities with a focus on understanding a chosen phenomenon or the principle of laboratory apparatus, such as thermal radiation and a heat pump. Students had access to handheld infrared (IR) cameras for their investigations. Purpose: The purpose of the…

This paper presents a tool, LABEL, oriented to the teaching of parallel robotics. The application, organized as a set of tools developed using Easy Java Simulations, enables the study of the kinematics of parallel robotics. A set of classical parallel structures was implemented such that LABEL can solve the inverse and direct kinematic problem of…

This study examines the challenges faced by pre-service chemistry teachers teaching in a laboratory and their proposed solutions to these challenges. The study was conducted in a 13-week-long methodology course. Written statements from participants and observations from researchers were used as data sources. From these data, it was found that the…

Acommon undergraduate laboratory experience is the determination of the elastic constant of a spring, whether studying the elongation under a static load or studying the damped harmonic motion of the spring with a suspended mass. An alternative approach to this laboratory experience has been suggested by Menezes et al., aimed at studying the…

Though many undergraduates are interested in medicine, relatively few experiments related to drug design and development are included in introductory chemistry laboratory courses. In this experiment, aqueous solutions of four different drugs (acetaminophen, caffeine, phenacetin, and sulfanilamide) are extracted using 1-octanol, a mimic of the…

Nowadays, the use of data-acquisition systems in undergraduate laboratories is routine. Many computer-assisted experiments became possible with the PASCO scientific data-acquisition system based on the 750 Interface and DataStudio software. A new data-acquisition system developed by PASCO includes the 850 Universal Interface and Capstone software.…

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a process commonly used for the synthesis of thin films for several important technological applications, for example, microelectronics, hard coatings, and smart windows. Unfortunately, the complexity and prohibitive cost of CVD equipment makes it seldom available for undergraduate chemistry students. Here, a…

The present study employed a quasi-experimental design to assess a computer-based tool, which was intended to scaffold the task of designing experiments when using a virtual lab for the process of experimentation. In particular, we assessed the impact of this tool on primary school students' cognitive processes and inquiry skills before and after…

This paper presents several methods for motivating students taking a power system protection (PSP) course. The paper reviews the laboratory activities developed for the PSP course at Curtin University, Australia; these methods are applicable and can be used for PSP course instruction at any institution. These activities were developed to improve…

Although much of the scientific community concerns itself with ideas of a sustainable future, very little of this interest and motivation has reached the classroom experience of the average chemistry major, and therefore, it is imperative to expose students to these ideas early in their careers. The focus of most undergraduate chemistry curricula…

Physiology instructors often are faced with the challenge of providing informative and educationally stimulating laboratories while trying to design them in such a way that encourages students to be actively involved in their own learning. With many laboratory experiments designed with simplicity and efficiency as the primary focus, it is…

Many biochemistry laboratory courses expose students to laboratory techniques through pre-determined experiments in which students follow stepwise protocols provided by the instructor. This approach fails to provide students with sufficient opportunities to practice experimental design and critical thinking. Ten inquiry modules were created for a…