First day of school blues!
Well, its that start of a new academic year. Anybody want to share horror stories or unexpected pleasantness about the first week or so?
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First day activity
I wear my VIPEr tatoo on my arm. I show short segments of the movies Apollo 13 and October Sky and talk about scientific methodology. As part of this activity the students take a short exra-credit quiz.
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Molybdate/phosphate spectrophotometric analysis
We are developing a spectrophotometric analysis lab for Gen Chem looking at nitrate and phosphate concentrations in water samples from different locations in the Willamette River.
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Cool first day activities?
Hi everyone,
I was wondering what kinds of interesting ways that people kick off the school year/ set the tone for the semester with their students (upper or lower division)?
With my lower level students, I've sometimes taken a recent article from a newspaper (an article about a local magnesium fire or the polonium poisoning that happened a couple of years ago, come to mind as examples) and had students come up with 10 inorganic chemistry questions based on the article, to emphasize the importance of asking the right kinds of questions in the class.
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Inorganic Nomenclature
We all hate it...yet we all need it. Short of buying IUPAC's two versions of the Little Red Book, do people know of good resources? There's the Wikipedia page on the 2005 "reforms" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_nomenclature_of_inorganic_chemistry_…
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Scientist code of ethics
I am working on a syllabus for an upper division lab and thought that it would be great to have my students sign some sort of a scientific honor statement in order to try to foster an atmosphere of honesty in data collection and reporting. Has anybody done this or something similar? Was it successful? Does anybody have a good one? Of course I would reference you:)
Thanks,
Tim
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Bioinorganic chemistry in sophomore level courses
As I've stated in another post, we have this odd first semester course that is a hybrid between a sophomore descriptive inorganic chemistry course and general chemistry. Since this course is the ONLY inorganic course that our biochemistry majors are exposed to, I want to give them a flavor of why inorganic chemistry is important to their field. Some of the topics that I have typically taught with bioinorganic applications include: acidity of metal ions and bioavailability, HSAB, types of ligands and the chelate effect, and hemoglobin as a case study in coordination chemistry. I've sometimes done some redox applications as well. Anyone have any particularly fun bioinorganic chemistry applications that are accessible to approximately a sophomore level course (perhaps with an appropriate article for the students to read)? --Hilary
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descriptive chemistry of the elements
I think we can all agree that the descriptive chemistry of the elements (I am thinking mostly of the p block, but some aspects of the d block as well) is:
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Anyone ever use Peter Siska's "University Chemistry"
I am looking at this book as a possibility for our sort of non-traditional introductory sequence. I was curious if anyone else has any experience with it. Do student's like it? Is it accessible despite being an Honors level text?
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General chemistry
Hello everybody,
I'd like to draw your attention to our website
onto which we uploaded the general chemistry course given to first year students in biology and medicine. The course is not totally completed (Analytical chemistry lacks its last chapter) but is multilingual with French English (direct access: http://chimge.epfl.ch/Index_en.html) and German presently available. Any comment is welcome!
Jean-Claude
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