Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Exciting Chemistry and Chemical Education What a great subject we have the privilege to teach! Chemistry is endlessly fascinating, it inspires and rewards imagination, and there are so many practical applications that depend on it. Though I suppose I should not be, I am continually surprised by the unending stream of new discoveries and amazed by the elegant and resourceful approaches taken by those doing modern chemical research. Just yesterday, in the section of the New York Times devoted to electronics and information technology, I ran across a description of the research of Angela M. Belcher, Associate Professor of Materials Science at MIT, which melds inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and electrical engineering. The research involves genetically engineered viruses that serve as templates to grow single-crystal semiconductor and metal nanowires of uniform size, shape, phase, and composition (1). Experts in the electronics industry suggest that “this kind of chemistry could revolutionize many manufacturing processes” (2). Notice that the research is described as “chemistry”, underscoring the tremendous scope of our subject and also our responsibility to help students appreciate and capitalize on that breadth so that they can make similar contributions to society through chemistry. I am equally amazed by the ingenuity chemists have applied to incorporating new discoveries into the chemistry curriculum or to making those ideas accessible to the public. This issue of the Journal nicely illustrates my point. Many of the papers in it demonstrate that with creativity even the latest, most esoteric developments can be made available to a wide audience and connected with common experiences. And those papers leave us little leeway to argue that such topics cannot be incorporated into our course and curricula. On pages 544A and 544B, McFarland, Haynes, Mirkin, Van Duyne, and Godwin describe how students can make solutions of gold nanoparticles and, using the color change that accompanies electrolyte-induced aggregation of those particles, develop an electrolyte sensor. This is an activity that students can do hands-on and, despite the presence of gold, it is not expensive. Any of us could use it to give our students an opportunity to experience phenomena that are the subject of contemporary chemical research. Pages 545–566 provide more examples of how research on self-assembled monolayers, scanning tunneling microscopy, and fluorescence microscopy of single molecules can be incorporated into courses on organic chemistry, physical chemistry, instrumentation, and even junior high school science. Not all of us can use all of these techniques in our courses, but many of us could use some of them—and we should. In the paper immediately following those just cited, Hahn and Polik conclude that an important factor correlated with success in physical chemistry is motivation. The excitement of modern research constantly attracts students to science. Maintaining and enhancing that excitement by showing students how what they are learning relates to newsworthy research should be included in our pedagogical repertoire. www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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If we are to incorporate …with creativity even modern research into our teaching, we have to know the latest, most esoteric about it. Therefore, one of my goals for this Journal developments can be during the next several years is to bring even more cutmade available to a ting-edge chemical research into its pages. This will rewide audience quire a great deal of effort by many different parts of and connected with our constituency. For example, a new column edicommon experiences. tor is working on a column that will summarize research advances from many different sources to augment our reports from Nature and other journals. We are also developing, as part of the JCE Digital Library, a series of reports on research that will appear in JCE Online and be built around themes derived from the National Science Education Standards. To do these things we need your help, so I am asking for volunteers. At present we have no reporter for Science or JACS, two journals that could provide something of interest regularly. We also need more people who are involved in original research, such as the authors of this month’s classroom activity, who will take the time to recast their research publications into a format that is pedagogically suitable. If you are involved in such research projects, please send us your contributions. Even if you are not, consider whether you could identify such people and encourage them to write for JCE. If you have incorporated some of the latest research into your curriculum or courses, by all means summarize what you have done in a JCE article and submit it. I hope you will get involved in these and other actions to bring the latest chemical research to a broader audience. The level of elegance, resourcefulness, and imagination that is required for real advances in chemical education is comparable to that required in chemical research. So is the level of hard work. But we have many hands that can labor in concert to make that work lighter. Perhaps with excitation to a slightly higher energy, we can collaborate to use this Journal as a nexus for sharing the excitement of chemistry. We should each make a contribution, large or small, toward the goal of attracting students to modern, interdisciplinary chemistry. Literature Cited 1. Mao, Chuanbin; Solis, Daniel J.; Reiss, Brian D.; Kottmann, Stephen T.; Sweeney, Rosamond Y.; Hayhurst, Andrew; Georgiou, George; Iverson, Brent; Belcher, Angela M. Science 2004, 303 (5655), 213–217. 2. Theis, Thomas N., quoted in a story by Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times, Feb 12, 2004, p E8.
Vol. 81 No. 4 April 2004
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Journal of Chemical Education
455
