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the many available modes of operation. A difficulty often encountered with this latter approach is the unavailability of state-of-the-art instruments in purely educational laboratories. In many institutions expensive items are necessarily purchased on research grants and can be used only by participants in the designated research programs. Instruments for teaching laboratories are likely to be old models, donated to the school by local industries that see a chance to combine academic goodwill with a sizable tax writeoff. In this respect some small undergraduate colleges may be better off than their large university neighbors; there is a closeness between students and research projects in the smaller institutions that makes modern instruments available to all if they are present anywhere in the department. Lacking such instruments, the instructor should consider the use of computer simulation—programming a computer to produce data that appear to have come from an analytical instrument.
CIRCLE 5 ON READER SERVICE CARD
388 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 57, NO. 3, MARCH 1985
On the other hand, a modular approach can be adopted. The student is asked to synthesize working instruments from available parts, such as light sources, monochromators, and detectors, together with a large selection of electronic building blocks and measuring gear. It is obviously impossible to train a student to be a competent mechanic, an up-to-date electronics wizard, an expert in optics, and a polished computer programmer, as well as a good chemist. The ideal is a noble one, but the practice must be more realistic. A good instrumentation curriculum should provide students with enough understanding of the fields of electronics, mechanics, optics, and computer science to allow them to cooperate effectively with experts in those fields. It is unlikely that a computer scientist will spend the time to learn the details of, for example, NMR, or that an electrical engineer will be familiar with the nonlinear behavior of the impedance of an electrode surface. In contrast, the chemist is invariably confronted with equipment that relies heavily on state-of-the-art electronics, mechanics, and optics. It is therefore incumbent upon chemists to learn enough of the technical fields that they can at least make their wishes known and be able to evaluate with reasonable confidence the tools constructed by their technical friends—to be sure that such tools will fill the requirements of their chemical problems. Electronics Over the past 10 years electronics has progressed to the point where the transfer functions of standard and easily used building blocks can be represented by simple mathematical expressions with an accuracy that meets or exceeds that of most of the sensors found in the laboratory. A good grasp of mathematics will then go a long way toward the implementation of many useful pieces of equipment. Similarly, standard digital function blocks allow the construction of impressive pieces of dedicated logic with only modest understanding of the circuitry inside the individual units. The convenience of standard electronic building blocks has allowed chemistry students to achieve a useful degree of proficiency in their use in a very short time. This apparent success, however, comes at the expense of instilling a false sense of competency. A semester of electronics dealing with potentiostats, integrators, temperature controllers, and digital timers is by no means comparable to a curriculum in electrical engineering. The goal of the electronics exposure thus must
