Chemistry for Everyone
A Chemistry Minute: Recognizing Chemistry in Our Daily Lives Dianne J. Luning Prak* and Christine L. Copper Department of Chemistry, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD 21402; *
[email protected] General chemistry is often taken by students to fulfill a prerequisite for a subsequent course or as a general education requirement. Students in the course under these circumstances may not be interested in the subject or understand its relevance to their lives. To generate interest and demonstrate relevance, many approaches have been taken to incorporate some aspect of context-based learning in general chemistry classes. These approaches range from individual instructors discussing relevant applications to institutional programs that use a specific context (e.g., sports, news events) to teach chemical concepts (1–4). For individual instructors, one method that can be used to demonstrate relevance and generate interest is to require each student to find an example of chemistry and present it orally to the class. To make this exercise fit within the time constraints of lecture, the oral presentation is limited to around two minutes. We call this exercise a “chemistry minute.” This exercise gives students an opportunity to think about chemistry taking place around them. The presentations often generate questions that can be addressed immediately or in later class sessions. Sometimes, students present incorrect information, which opens a discussion on the importance of sources of information and allows the instructor to correct any chemical misconceptions. The presentations also provide new examples for instructors to use in future classes. A chemistry minute has the added benefit of introducing the students to oral presentations. Most science and engineering programs require students to make oral presentations as a way to increase communication skills (5–8). In many cases,
oral communication is developed by incorporating it into a multiple-semester sequence of classes (5, 8), usually beginning in students’ third and fourth years. These presentations may be on a specific topic related to a course being taken or on experimental research the student has conducted. In the latter case, oral communication skills may be developed via poster presentations (7). Very little emphasis has been given to oral presentations in general chemistry classes, so the chemistry minute is a way to fill that niche. The Assignment At the beginning of each semester, each student is assigned a day that he or she will present a chemistry minute via a form similar to the one shown in Textbox 1. It is convenient to have the chemistry minute take place the same day each week so a routine is developed. The chemistry minutes can be guided towards a particular area of chemistry (i.e., environmental chemistry, chemistry in the military, etc.) or they could be left wide open with only the requirement that no topic be repeated during the semester. Grading policies on the assignment can range from no credit given to the presentation counting as a quiz or homework grade. Experience Using This Assignment The topics the students select range in complexity and relevance. Students sometimes find topics that are very relevant
Presentation Assignment for “A Chemistry Minute” To help us all to realize that chemistry is everywhere and is an important part of our daily experiences, I am asking you to make a short (
