Curriculum laboratory courses

Computational methods are of increasing importance in the chemical sciences. This paper describes a computational chemistry laboratory course that has been developed and implemented at the University of Michigan as part of the core physical chemistry curriculum. This laboratory course introduces students to the principle methods of computational chemistry and uses these methods to explore and visualize simple chemical problems. 

In discussing physical chemistry curriculum revision we voiced many of the same concerns that are detailed in the New Traditions Physical Chemistry Curriculum Planning Session Report (7). Our new curriculum attempts to address specifically the concerns regarding math preparation, course content, active learning, writing skills, and appropriate utilization of the laboratory course to enhance learning. 

With so many factors contributing to the curriculum as a whole, it is important to take a step back and to look at the final impact. Students experiencing the CASPiE curriculum directly express that their laboratory course exposed them to a new understanding of science. Many students even go so far as to say that they did not know what science was before CASPiE. 

To meet the new undergraduate curriculum requirements at SFU, the Department of Chemistry recently altered a required second-year inorganic chemistry laboratory course to provide specific instruction in scientific writing. The weekly 4-h laboratory sessions remain, in the traditional way, the time for students to receive hands on experience with basic inorganic chemistry concepts and laboratory techniques. With the addition of weekly 1-h tutorials, detailed instruction could focus on the various aspects of writing typically associated with a laboratory science. Attendance at both the laboratory and tutorial sessions is mandatory. 

While this textbook could easily be used as a primary textbook for a course in chemical safety, the authors actually strongly prefer that it be used instead throughout the curriculum. We believe that safety instruction is so important that it should be included in all chemistry laboratory courses. Additionally, the small bites of lab safety included among the 70 sections used separately over an extended four-year period provide constant reinforcement of the importance of safety that nurtures a strong safety ethic. This book has been written with that use in mind. 

Instruction in laboratory safety is increasingly becoming an important part of laboratory courses at many academic institutions. Also, other research organizations, both commercial and otherwise, offer organized courses in laboratory safety. This textbook has been designed to be used as a reference for such courses, both for students and for instructors preparing a curriculum. 

Even if the institution or department has no formal course in laboratory safety, safety training must never be neglected. For laboratory courses, incorporate the safety curriculum into the laboratory manual, and devote a portion of the pre-laboratory lecture every day to discuss safety issues for the particular experiment. In this fashion, the students awareness of the need to observe safety precautions will be heightened. Cover the following points in the curriculum and laboratory manual ... 

Some safety programs require documentation of safety training for students taking laboratory courses. If the course curriculum material shows that safety topics are included in the laboratory, and the student pre-lab reports referred to above are retained, the need for documentation may be satisfied. 

The series of lectures cover scientific programming and an introduction to numerical algorithms (5th semester), the programming of physical and chemical problems with an introduction to computer-simulation (6th semester), and an overview over the various applications of computers in chemistry (7th semester) (Table 2). This program comprises a one-semester laboratory course (20 hours a week 14 weeks total) where the students work on practical assignments. Currently about 25% of the students select Computer-Based Chemistry as their optional specialization. For more information about the curriculum of the department of chemistry of ETH Zurich see http //www,chem.ethz.ch/D-CHEM-Department.html... 

SUPPORT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION of new courses and laboratories in materials science is available through National Science Foundation programs in both the Division of Undergraduate Education and the Division of Materials Research. The Division of Undergraduate Education has separate programs targeting laboratory, curriculum, and faculty. 

At UCI, she teaches graduate-level courses in atmospheric chemistry on a regular basis. In addition, she teaches such classes as undergraduate instrumental analysis, in which she is developing a new laboratory curriculum centered around the analysis of complex environmental mixtures. This work has been supported by the Dreyfus Foundation and UCI. 

The predecessor of this volume appeared in 1993, and covers a variety of topics. (7) The present volume also contains various schemes for improving the physical chemistry curriculum, as well as new suggestions for the laboratory portion of the course. There have been other workshops and meetings, including a workshop on curricular developments in the analytical sciences sponsored by the NSF and chaired by Prof. Ted Kuwana of the University of Kansas. (2) You, the teacher of physical chemistry must decide how to apply this large amount of information and the physical chemistry knowledge that you already possess. You should make these decisions consciously, based on the situation that you face and on your goals and objectives for the course. This essay is primarily an attempt by a retired professor of physical chemistry to comment on some of the decisions he has made in a career of four decades. 

The growth of computational chemistry and the ready availability of commercial ab initio packages has had a dramatic effect on the way that physical chemistry is practiced in the contemporary research laboratory. The clear implication is that without integration of computational chemistry into our physical chemistry laboratory curriculum we will be failing to teach our students how contemporary research is conducted. Fortunately, a number of approaches to including computational chemistry in the physical chemistry laboratory have been developed. These range from modifications of the full course to individual computational chemistry exercises for the laboratory. These developments can be found in Table VII. 

Two papers reported powder pattern crystallographic results. The paper by Santos et al. (7) stood out from the rest because it presented a collection of more classical physical chemistry experiments. In this paper the authors described the use of micro-combustion calorimetry, Knudsen effusion to determine enthalpy of sublimation, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, and computed entropies. While this paper may provide some justification for including bomb calorimetry and Knudsen cell experiments in student laboratories, the use of differential scanning calorimetry and x-ray diffraction also are alternatives that would make for a crowded curriculum. Thus, how can we choose content for the first physical chemistiy course that shows the currency of the discipline while maintaining the goal to teach the fundamentals and standard techniques as well ... 

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