This paper describes a student laboratory in the Unit Operations Laboratory at the Colorado School of Mines: air separation by pressure swing adsorption. The flexibility of the system enables students to study the production of enriched nitrogen or oxygen streams. Automatic data acquisition permits the study of cycle steps and performance.…

Well-designed "controls" distinguish experimental from non-experimental studies. Surprisingly, we found that a high percentage of students had difficulty identifying control experiments even after completing three university-level laboratory courses. To address this issue, we designed and ran a revised cell biology lab course in which…