Water can exhibit many different colors due to a variety of physical properties. Here, we focus on some observable colors within very pure freshwater. We only treat the absorption of light due to electronic and ro-vibrational excitations and scattering due to refractive index fluctuations of the water and the respective consequences for the…

The reduction of alkenes usually involves a hydrogen source and a catalyst. This process is both expensive and not well-suited for a large teaching laboratory. This paper presents an alternative procedure using a mixture of cobalt chloride and sodium borohydride to achieve the reduction of methyl oleate to methyl stearate. This procedure is safe,…

We herein report an efficient aerobic oxidative cleavage of meso-hydrobenzoin to benzaldehyde using a heterogeneous earth-abundant metal oxide catalyst. The reaction can be carried out at 70 °C in ethanol and uses a balloon filled with O2 as oxidant. Reagents are simple and have long shelf lives, and the whole laboratory exercise can be done in…

The bioinspired polymer polydopamine is synthesized and deposited on semiconductive glass substrates under different synthesis conditions (pH and oxidant type). Electrochemical methods are used to verify polymer deposition on the substrate and to examine the charge transfer properties of the obtained coatings. The presence of aromatic rings from…

Photocatalytic hydrogen generation over semiconductor photocatalysts has attracted considerable attention over the past few decades. This experiment is designed for sophomore- and higher-level undergraduates who are in the majors of materials chemistry, analytical chemistry, catalysis, or chemical engineering. In this experiment, CdS nanoparticles…

Students are introduced to the term wavelength in optics at school level. In this paper, we present an inexpensive and simple method to measure the wavelength of the light of a light emitting diode using a light depending resistor. This experimental set-up is developed at Science Laboratory, Nehru Planetarium (Mumbai), India. It is useful as an…

Teacher education needs to combine training in content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). One important part of PCK in science education is knowledge about school science practical work to promote learning by scientific inquiry and about the nature of science. In Germany, practical seminars and lab sessions…

In recent years, with the more powerful functions of smartphones, the use of sensors integrated by mobile phones as an auxiliary tool for physical experiment teaching has become more popular. Combined with the related mobile phone apps, people easily can develop and expand the physical experiment contents of mechanics, optics, acoustic phenomena,…

Ever since Newton's groundbreaking work on the composed nature of light, additive colour mixing (and its laws) are subject to the interest of physicists as well as other sciences. In this paper, we present a setup for simple lab or home experiments on additive colour mixing and the laws of colour mixing. Students use the screen of a laptop or…

A revised version of a traditional physical chemistry laboratory experiment has been developed to enhance student discussion in the laboratory and to improve students' connections between physical chemistry concepts and real molecular systems. In this experiment, students explore the keto-enol tautomerization of 2,4-pentanedione. However, unlike…

How can you switch from a hands-on face-to-face chemistry course to an online course in the face of a pandemic? It is possible to have students do hands-on experiments at home. There are many readily available kitchen, drug store, and garden chemicals that can be used to illustrate the same principles in standard chemistry curricula at multiple…

A set of inexpensive and pedagogically rich experiments focusing on S[subscript N]1, E1, and E2 reactions have been updated to include modern computational and spectroscopic analyses. The S[subscript N]1 experiment involves treatment of "tert"-amyl alcohol with hydrochloric acid to generate the corresponding alkyl chloride, which is used…

This article illustrates the use of Microsoft OneNote as an Electronic Notebook for undergraduate biochemistry lab reports as well as student opinions of this use both before and during the online coursework shift during the pandemic.

Course specific learning outcomes are an important tool to define the scope of a course and can be very helpful when designing experiments and assessments. With slight modification, these learning outcomes can serve as a guide when transitioning to the distance learning format especially in courses with a traditional lab. Here we present such an…

Although nearly everyone is familiar with colors from an early age and the fundamentals of color mixing are taught at various abstraction levels throughout kindergarten to high school, we repeatedly observe that our student teachers in physics have problems in explaining the subject. Therefore, we propose an experimental setup that focuses on the…