Chemistry-related software, or chemistry "apps", on hand-held and portable touch-controlled computers such as smartphones and iPods are seeing dramatic growth with increasing adoption rates. This review covers about 30 popular and mostly free apps that can be used to learn chemistry and to serve as reference or research tools. The target…

This paper provides nine short chemically based puzzles or problems extensible for use with students from middle school to college. Some of these will strengthen students' recognition of individual elements and element names. Others require students to focus on the salient properties of given chemical elements.

Periodic Table Target, a game for middle school or high school students, familiarizes students with the form of the periodic table and the biological significance of different elements. The Periodic Table Target game board is constructed as a class project, and the game is played to reinforce the content. Students are assigned several elements…

"If protons, quarks, and other elementary particles are too small to be seen, how do scientists know they exist? And if these particles do exist, how can one estimate their size, structure, and or their arrangement in atoms?" These are some of the most frequently asked questions by students who study atomic theory. Atomic structure is an important…

This article describes laboratory activity that examines the chemical process of smoking and the components of smoke, of both cigarettes and water pipes (narghiles also known as "hookah"). The aim of this activity is to expose adolescents to the scientific aspects of smoking; and to present the relevance of chemistry in everyday life. (Contains 3…

The cryophorus dramatically demonstrates the cooling effect of evaporation. This article describes some simple and easy-to-make cryophoruses, ideal for demonstrating evaporative cooling to students at all levels. The most dramatic effects occurred with cyclohexane and benzene, with water generally freezing more slowly. (Contains 4 notes, 2 tables,…

The experiment developed in this article addresses the concept of equipment calibration for reducing systematic error. It also suggests simple student-prepared sucrose solutions for which accurate densities are known, but not readily available to students. Densities are measured with simple glassware that has been calibrated using the density of…

This paper summarizes difficulties that chemistry students at all levels commonly exhibit when translating, manipulating, and interpreting mathematical expressions that contain logarithms, and offers approaches that the authors have found useful to help students overcome such difficulties. The online supplement provides problem sets created by the…

The use of harmful organic solvents in classrooms has become a critical issue of concern in the field of chemistry education. This article describes a classroom activity at a high school in which an acrylic fabric was used as the extraction medium in the analysis of the detergent concentration in water instead of organic solvents. Dyes were used…

This article describes a novel, hands-on method to qualitatively determine the extent of microbial activity in topsoil using ordinary blank paper. Appropriate and scalable for the high school and college level, these experiments expose students to some of the challenges facing environmental researchers and also contribute to curriculum development…

We present an alternative to a traditional first-year chemistry laboratory experiment. This experiment has four key features: students utilize stoichiometry, learn and apply principles of green chemistry, engage in authentic scientific inquiry, and discover why each part of a scientific lab report is necessary. The importance and essential…

A summer course was developed with the goal of preparing girls to succeed in secondary school chemistry. Group work and mathematical, logical, and laboratory skills were stressed in the course, with minimal emphasis on memorization. Students who took the summer course ranked statistically higher during their first semester of high school chemistry…