This lab is a computer simulation of transmission genetics. It presents students with a genetic phenomenon--the inheritance of a randomly--selected trait. The students' task is to determine how this trait is inherited by designing their own crosses and analyzing the results produced by the software.

Although an understanding of radiometric dating is central to the preparation of every geologist, many students struggle with the concepts and mathematics of radioactive decay. Physical demonstrations and hands-on experiments can be used to good effect in addressing this teaching conundrum. Water, heat, and electrons all move or flow in response…

This paper details a successful and inexpensive implementation of a remote laboratory into a distance control systems course using readily available hardware and software. The physical experiment consists of a beach ball and a dc blower; the control objective is to make the height of the aerodynamically levitated beach ball track a reference…

This study investigated the possible connection between effective laboratory activities and student performance on lecture exams. In a traditional undergraduate organic chemistry course for non-science majors, students could predict the products of organic reactions, but struggled to provide reaction mechanisms for those same reactions, despite…

The exponential function model of radioactive decay and the concept of a half-life are used in nuclear experiments that appear in introductory and intermediate laboratories. In our interactions with students, we have found that students at all levels have significant confusion about both the term exponential and what is meant by a half-life as…

The objective of this study was to identify changes in dominant preferred learning styles of students based on instructional presentation of course content. This study evaluates dominant preferred learning styles of two groups of university students. The first group of students was enrolled in a course that introduces graphical representation in…

High-expectation start-ups are firms launched by entrepreneurs with high ambitions for growth. The encounter between new technology and entrepreneurship that characterizes such new ventures has a significant impact on the nature and speed of economic development, driving the growth of high-technology industries and helping to make the economic…

An experiment in chemical kinetics as part of our Discovery Chemistry curriculum is described. Discovery Chemistry is a pedagogical philosophy that makes the laboratory the key center of learning for students in their first two years of undergraduate instruction. Questions are posed in the pre-laboratory discussion and assessed using pooled…

In this experiment, organic chemistry students perform reactions between three naphthyl acetate derivatives and the diazonium salt Fast-Red TR, under basic conditions. The three naphthyl acetate derivatives used in this study are 2-naphthyl acetate (1a), 6-bromo-2-naphthyl acetate (1b) and 1,6-dibromo-2-naphthyl acetate (1c). The two-step, one-pot…

It is well known that proteins are abundant in food and are vital to nutrition and biochemical function. What is not well known is that proteins derived from agricultural sources are used in everyday products such as glue and textiles. Research continues to find new uses for proteins in a wide variety of applications, most of which would be…

Learn how to use biotechnology to investigate a serious agricultural problem. The exercise presented here provides an inexpensive way to introduce students to ELISA techniques in an economically and agriculturally important context.

A guided-inquiry exercise conducted in both the lecture and laboratory components of a college introductory chemistry course for non-science majors is described. The exercise gave students the opportunity to independently determine the relationship between the temperature of water in an aluminum soda can and the intensity of implosion upon placing…

Studies from our laboratories over recent years have uncovered the existence, and established the properties of a variety of mitochondrial transporters. The properties of these transporters throw light on a variety of biochemical phenomena that were previously poorly understood. In particular the role of mitochondrial transport in energy…

In this work, we present a simple analysis of binary diffraction gratings with different slit widths relative to the grating period. The analysis is based on a simple phasor technique directly derived from the Huygens principle. By introducing a slit phasor and a grating phasor, the intensity of the diffracted orders and the grating's resolving…

A magnetically controlled pendulum is used for observing free and forced oscillations, including nonlinear oscillations and chaotic motion. A data-acquisition system stores the data and displays time series of the oscillations and related phase plane plots, Poincare maps, Fourier spectra and histograms. The decay constant of the pendulum can be…