To Bond or Not to Bond: Making and Breaking Connections
If you were not able to join us for the AP Teach meeting on Thursday, September 19th, you missed a great meeting! During the meeting, To Bond or Not to Bond: Making and Breaking Connections, we discussed covalent bonds, ionic bonds, and interparticle forces.
Video highlights from the September 2024 APTeach Session.
Michael Farabaugh spoke about Morse potential energy diagrams and lattice energy. He gave some great examples of questions that can be used with students and went over some past AP exam questions over the topics. Kristen Vanderveen and Shifra Yonis demonstrated some simulations from PhET and Concord Consortium that can be used to help students understand Morse potential energy curves and interparticle forces. These resources can be used for demonstrations or class activities. Sue Biggs offered some great advice about teaching interparticle forces. Specifically, she cautioned about emphasizing to students a list of interparticle forces in terms of strengths where London Dispersion forces are the weakest, followed by dipole-dipole, and then hydrogen bonding. There are several questions that have appeared on past AP Chemistry exams where students are presented with physical data that does not match this interparticle forces strengths list. Sometimes, London Dispersion forces can be stronger than, say dipole-dipole. When students are taught a list of interparticle forces strengths and do not understand that they can vary from this list, they will often answer these questions incorrectly on the AP Chemistry exam. Sue also warned teachers to be careful with online videos regarding interparticle forces. Some of them were not created with the AP Chemistry exam in mind and use vocabulary incorrectly or do not emphasize information needed for our students. Carrie Alexander completed the session with a great interactive storyboarding activity on the difference between boiling water and the electrolysis of water. This is a great activity that I am looking forward to using with my students to emphasize the difference between overcoming interparticle forces versus breaking bonds. The meeting ended with breakout rooms where everyone was able to share how they help students compare strengths of interparticle forces, address misconceptions, and the activities they use in their classrooms. If you missed this meeting, please join us for our next meeting, Energetic Collisions: KMT, Maxwell-Boltzmann, and Deviating from Ideal Behavior, on Thursday, October 24th at 7:00 ET to discuss deviations from ideal gas laws, Kinetic Molecular Theory, and Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions and teaching strategies to help students better understand these topics. Hope to see you there!
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Each one hour APTeach Zoom session provides 15-20 minutes of a discussion centered around a challenging chemistry topic before moving into breakout rooms that allow small groups of teachers to share their best teaching practices related to that content.
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