There are many lab exercises for upper-level school students and freshman undergraduates to measure the value of the local acceleration due to gravity ("g") near Earth's surface. In these exercises, the value of "g" is usually taken to be constant. The approach is often based on measuring the period of a pendulum that is…

A kinetic isotope effect (KIE) experiment is described for the physical chemistry laboratory. Students conduct a hypochlorite (household bleach) oxidation of an equimolar mixture of 1-phenylethanol and 1-deuterio-1-phenylethanol to acetophenone. The reaction occurs in a biphasic reaction mixture and follows first-order kinetics with respect to…

Self-reflection assignments were used and assessed in an undergraduate kinetics course. The assignments involved essays where students were prompted to evaluate their proficiency in professional, non-technical skills guided by a self-evaluation rubric, which includes a rating scheme for 10 non-technical skills. The students set goals and tracked…

Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is a synthetic chemical process that replicates natural photosynthesis to mass produce hydrogen as a clean fuel from sunlight-driven water splitting (2H[subscript 2]O [right arrow] O[subscript 2] + H[subscript 2]). In both natural and artificial photosynthesis, an oxygen-evolving catalyst (OEC) is needed to catalyze…

Despite widespread use in general chemistry laboratories, the crystal violet chemical kinetics experiment frequently suffers from erroneous student results. Student calculations for the reaction order in hydroxide often contain large asymmetric errors, pointing to the presence of systematic error. Through a combination of "in silico"…

This article posits that each content area that falls under the umbrella of kinesiology must develop a future cadre of professionals who are competent in their content knowledge and are trained as leaders who are able to understand the essential impacts of culture on their work. The intentional development of culturally fluent leaders should be a…

A science video blog, which has gone viral, shows a wooden block shot by a vertically aimed rifle. The video shows that the block hit dead center goes exactly as high as the one shot off-center. (Fig. 1). The puzzle is that the block shot off-center carries rotational kinetic energy in addition to the gravitational potential energy. This leads a…

An open-source electrochemistry simulation package has been developed that simulates the electrode processes of four reaction mechanisms and two typical electroanalysis techniques: cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry. Unlike other open-source simulation software, this package balances the features with ease of learning and implementation and…

A hands-on educational module was created to illustrate the scope of chemical engineering. Students are taught fundamental concepts that they integrate in a laboratory experience designing and fabricating a 'plant-on-a-chip' microfluidic device capable of continuous processing of reactive flows. Students gain insight into chemical engineering…

Instead of solving ordinary differential equations (ODEs), the damped simple harmonic motion (SHM) is surveyed qualitatively from basic mechanics and quantitatively by the instrumentality of a graph of velocity against displacement. In this way, the condition b ? [square root]4mk for the occurrence of the non-oscillating critical damping and…

We inserted a self-taught molecular modeling project into an otherwise conventional undergraduate chemical-reaction-engineering course. Our objectives were that students should (a) learn with minimal instructor intervention, (b) gain an appreciation for the relationship between molecular structure and, first, macroscopic state functions in…

This work describes a 10-week laboratory project studying wild-type and mutant bacterial alkaline phosphatase, in which students purify, quantitate, and perform kinetic assays on wild-type and selected mutants of the enzyme. Students also perform plasmid DNA purification, digestion, and gel analysis. In addition to simply learning important…

Kinematics is a topic students are unknowingly aware of well before entering the physics classroom. Students observe motion on a daily basis. They are constantly interpreting and making sense of their observations, unintentionally building their own understanding of kinematics before receiving any formal instruction. Unfortunately, when students…

The present study describes the design of a simple teaching module for each student to fabricate a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) that could power a small fan motor. The significance of this laboratory exercise is to stimulate students' motivation by visualizing the light being converted into electricity, which is then switched over to kinetic…

A highly instructive, wide-ranging laboratory project in which students study the effects of various parameters on the enzymatic activity of alcohol dehydrogenase has been adapted for the upper-division biochemistry and physical biochemistry laboratory. Our two main goals were to provide enhanced data analysis, featuring nonlinear regression, and…