inquiry-based discovery learning

Self-Inflatable Valentine Balloons – Chemistry is Everywhere!

Recently, while attending the High School Teacher Day at the ACS National meeting in New Orleans, we were given Wack-A-Pack™ valentine balloons and encouraged to play with them. I am a huge fan of finding chemistry in the real world and using it as an integral part of my instruction; and as we were experimenting, I was reminded of a rather fun activity I had done on Valentine’s Day with my AP students.

Using an Argument-Driven Inquiry framework for student exploration of gas laws

Based on some interactions here on ChemEd X and Twitter, I have been looking for ways to have students generate more questions, ideas, and investigation methods. (See a list of relevant links below.) Some of this is inspired by Argument Driven Inquiry, while some of it is simply my own quest to move further away from being the sole source of information in the class. In this blog post, I would like to talk about how I addressed gas laws using Atomsmith Classroom Online as an investigative tool in place of lab work I did previously using the Vernier gas pressure sensor.

 

Break the Ice with Mystery Blocks

In an effort to align my lessons with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), I have tried to take the content I have traditionally taught, and shift the design to focus on student engagement with the science and engineering practices outlined in the standards. For the topic of heat transfer I re-packaged the ice melting blocks discrepant event as a NGSS investigative phenomena.

Teaching Moles through Beans

The concept of the mole has always been a challenging topic for myself and my students. The challenge comes in part when we try to imagine 6.02 x 1023 of anything. Another challenge for some students is the math and theory behind this number and concept. I have tweaked an activity to help guide my students to an understanding of these concepts.