Are you in the mood for some chemical reactions? Do you want to participate in an electrochemistry laboratory activity? Are you interested in free equipment for your classroom? If you answered YES to any of these questions, then Pittcon and ChemEd 2019 has you covered!
Pittcon generously donated $20,000 in order to make it possible to offer workshops that are more extensive for teachers at ChemEd 2019. The ChemEd programs have mostly featured teachers giving talks and presenting workshops about their most successful teaching ideas, but with no funding for equipment and supplies for attending teachers to carry out the new lesson plans in their own classrooms. Many schools have very little money budgeted for supplies and equipment for teaching science. Therefore, with the donation, Pittcon is happy to be funding the cost of equipment for teacher workshops at ChemEd 2019. The teachers who attend the workshops will have the opportunity to take home materials and recreate the lessons learned from the workshop in their own classrooms. By funding this equipment, Pittcon has made it a productive and valuable experience for teachers to provide continuing education for their students with what they learned at ChemEd. Additionally, Pittcon is sponsoring six Teacher Workshops and seven Target Inquiry Workshops at ChemEd 2019.
The Pittcon sponsored teacher workshops consist of:
• Rose Clark and Ed Zovinka presenting the R.O.C.K. program that includes hands-on chemistry experiments and activities using mainly household products to show the importance of chemistry in day-to-day living.
• Barbara Manner exploring the use of children’s literature books and associated science activities.
• Karen Levitt presenting The Teaching Science with Toys workshop encourages teachers to have students ask questions about toys and then find the answers about basic principles of chemistry.
• Neal Dando, Jonell Kerkhoff and Susan Zawacky demonstrating two activities showing quantum effects, Measuring Planck’s Constant and Quantum Effects with Glow-Stars.
• Susan Zawacky presenting three easy displays of water’s high heat capacity: A Heat Race, A Drop of Boiling Water and Flaming Hands.
• Robert Paysen teaching a wide variety of activities to assist their students in understanding important concepts about light, color and spectroscopy – production of a spectrum (rainbow), naming the colors, addition and subtraction of colors, spectroscopy as an art form, and production of light by excitation of gases.
The following seven teachers have developed innovative and effective inquiry-based chemistry lessons through collaboration with the Target Inquiry Program based at Grand Valley State University (MI) and Miami University (OH). They are sharing their work in the following workshops:
- Chad Bridle teaching one workshop on a lesson featuring picture cards showing particle diagrams for chemical reactions. Bridle is also teaching a workshop on how to teach energy transfer on an atomic level using special ice-cube melting plates.
- Deanna Cullen teaching a workshop where participants will build an electrochemical cell and use a model of that cell to make connections between the symbolic, particulate and macroscopic levels of the reaction.
- Chad Husting teaching a workshop on demonstrating periodic trends.
- Doug Ragan presenting one workshop that features using the reaction of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid in a baggie to teach gas laws and one workshop that involves using small magnets to show particle behavior. Features giveaways.
- Angela Slater demonstrating a laboratory activity to measure reaction rates.
- Alice Putti presenting a workshop featuring models for weak acids and strong acids using pony beads in petri dishes. In another workshop, she is demonstrating key concepts about equilibrium on a molecular level using beakers of water and poker chips.
- Ryan Schoenborn presenting a workshop about measuring energy change for reactions.
For more information, including the abstracts and schedule details, on the Pittcon sponsored teacher workshops, visit https://pittcon.org/science-week/. These workshops are limited capacity so make sure you start planning your schedule now at https://chemed2019.sched.com/. We look forward to seeing you at ChemEd 2019!