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Chemistry for Everyone

Moving Chemistry Education into 3D: A Tetrahedral Metaphor for Understanding Chemistry Union Carbide Award for Chemical Education1 Peter Mahaffy Department of Chemistry, The King’s University College, Edmonton, AB, Canada, T6B 2H3; [email protected]

What glasses do chemists and citizens use to see the world of molecules? What images and metaphors do we use to look at chemistry education? Can we find useful overlap in those perspectives to reenergize learning within the classroom and beyond? Consider the acrylic painting in Figure 1. What do you see? It is a quiet, pastoral still life, vaguely reminiscent of Gauguin. But examine it closely and you will see rough textures and vivid colors that need to be mixed by the viewer’s eyes, and short slapdash, almost impressionistic brush strokes that imply something’s lurking under the placidity of stillness. The painting is a chemistry assignment by Andrea, a first-year student in my Chemistry 290 course for nonscientists who wrote at the beginning of the term that she was “kinda scared about chemistry” and did not know whether it would be important for her. Lee, another Chemistry 290 student artist, entitled her 3D collage (Figure 2) “I Like to Be Warm”. It powerfully represents her dark image of where we will end up if we continue to place desire for personal comfort over the need to collectively manage the world’s limited fossil fuel resources. How much do chemists and chemistry educators know about Lee’s or Andrea’s or other citizens’ views of chemistry? What barriers do nonscientists face in seeing the importance of the world of molecules? Let’s put on their glasses and look at Figure 3, which illustrates some familiar pictures used by chemists. Simple letters, connected by dashes and wedges, look unimportant or baffling to many members of the general public. Yet to a chemist those symbolic representations of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, taxol, nicotine, and 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-bis(4-chlorophenyl)ethane convey a great deal of meaning about important molecules in our lives. Not only can we extend those Lewis structures into 3D, but the symbols convey important underlying concepts about the

Figure 1. Andrea Kingma, Complexity of Life, 24 in. x 18 in. acrylic painting, Atrium, The King’s University College, 2003.

molecules, their structures and dynamics, formation, chemical reactions, environmental fate, and importance. Chemistry educators around the world are increasingly taking on the crucial task of helping fellow citizens such as Andrea and Lee make sense of the molecules behind our chemical canvas. Yet substantial barriers must be overcome—in Canada neither student could readily access an intro-

Figure 2. Lee Andrus, I Like to Be Warm, 18 in. x 40 in. mixed media, Atrium, The King’s University College, 2003.

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Vol. 83 No. 1 January 2006

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Journal of Chemical Education

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H C H

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Figure 3. A chemical canvas.

ductory science major’s university chemistry course. Many nonscience majors lack both the prerequisite high school chemistry and mathematics courses and the necessary confidence. Sometimes unpeeling those layers of meaning behind Lewis structures reveals unsettling images. Almost a century ago, Allerton Cushman described his ambivalent relationship with toluene, aniline, and other molecules extracted from coal tar. Even as William Perkin transformed these building blocks into artificial dyes that brightened fashionable society, toluene, as a carrier for three nitro groups, dealt death in the trenches of World War I and II. “The red silk parasol of a summer beach, and the red wound of war have a common origin in that black sticky mass,” said Cushman in 1917 (1). My students find a conceptual metaphor helpful in understanding Cushman’s perspective. We sometimes talk about molecules such as toluene, taxol, or DDT as having faces, which can mirror the motives of their chemist-creators. The conceptual metaphor in that statement (molecules have faces) describes the tenuous relationship human beings have with molecules and other tools of the science and technology that we harness—usually for good but sometimes for ill. Metaphors are powerful driving forces both in education and in science. Richard Lewontin describes how difficult it is to do the work of science without resorting to a language full of metaphors. “Virtually the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings, by reference to forces and processes that we cannot perceive directly be50


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cause they are too small, like molecules, or too vast, like the entire known universe….” (2). Metaphors also describe our values and drive our approaches to chemistry education. To improve our teaching and learning in the classroom and laboratory, we must explain phenomena even more complex than chemical reactions or mechanisms: the engagement of human beings with each other and with abstract ideas and concrete substances. The metaphors we choose to describe how students learn chemistry can profoundly affect educational research, curriculum development, classroom and laboratory learning and teaching, science literacy, and public trust in science. Brown has recently suggested that an examination of the metaphors scientists and science educators use can give us new insights into our understanding of how science is done (3). This article proposes a new conceptual metaphor to enrich our description of chemistry education and support the many existing efforts to help students make connections with the chemistry found in textbooks. One widely used metaphor for chemistry education takes the shape of a planar triangle. Chemistry educators have shown that students need to encounter chemistry at different thinking levels to obtain a rich understanding of chemical substances and reactions. Seminal work has been done on this by Johnstone (4), who suggests that we have paid too much attention to the “chemical” and not enough to the “education” part of chemical education. To address human learning patterns, Johnstone, Gabel, and others (5) propose focusing on three thinking levels in learning chemistry: the symbolic or representational (symbols, equations, calculations), the macroscopic (tangible, visible, laboratory), and the molecular or submicroscopic. To meet students at their level and avoid misconceptions, chemistry educators are advised to pay careful attention to how these thinking levels are introduced. Featured regularly in this and other science education journals (6) and incorporated into the design of secondary and post-secondary curriculum, including textbooks (7), lab manuals, and visualizations, the metaphor of a triangle of understanding has even become a benchmark for national science education standards in the United States (8). This metaphor has sharpened our vision, clarifying views of important dimensions of chemistry education. It has helped instructors and curriculum developers pay appropriate attention to all three levels of understanding, rather than working almost exclusively at the symbolic level. The triangle metaphor reminds us of the importance of balance between the symbolic and macroscopic or tangible levels, providing a useful check to the pendulum that swings back and forth between descriptive and theoretical emphases in university courses and programs. It has enriched the learning environment for students by directing chemistry education research toward student conceptions and misconceptions that occur at any one of the three vertices. Recent attention to the submicro point of the triangle has catalyzed the development of stunning visualization tools—computer animations, simulations, and molecular modeling that transform our ability to “see” atoms, molecules, and chemical changes (9). But does this trigonal planar metaphor have enough facets to adequately describe the education Lee and Andrea need to make confident decisions about the molecular dimensions


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of their everyday lives? Does it sufficiently underscore the educational changes we must make to rebuild trust with the public and motivate gifted young people to continue to enter the chemistry profession? Global public image initiatives by the chemical industry (10) and major chemical societies reflect major concerns about public distrust of chemistry and ineffective two-way communication between chemists and the public about the molecular world. Recent statistics also suggest that public chemistry literacy is low. In a recent National Science Foundation survey, 22% of adults and 28% of university graduates in the United States understood what a molecule is. While almost 78% of baccalaureate degree respondents expressed a real interest in scientific discoveries, only 47% said they felt well informed about those issues after completing their degrees (11). To address these concerns and to foster science literacy and public trust in chemistry, leading voices in chemistry education stress the need to connect chemistry to student experience. Johnstone suggests “beginning where the students are” and paying careful attention to learning models (4, 5a). Gabel highlights the difficulty students have in integrating the threefold representation of matter into long-term memory (5b). Many others are building curriculum and pedagogy around the web of connections (12) between chemistry and society, especially at the secondary level (13). But that web of human connections for both science majors and nonmajors is not adequately reflected in the conceptual metaphor we use to describe and define how students can best learn chemistry. And this may result in the human element not being sufficiently integrated into the content of chemistry. In this article I propose rehybridizing that planar triangular metaphor for learning chemistry into a tetrahedron (Figure 4) in which the fourth vertex represents the human contexts for chemistry. As this rehybridization emphasizes, we need to situate chemical concepts, symbolic representations, and chemical substances and processes in the authentic contexts of the human beings who create substances, the culture that uses them, and the students who try to understand them. In so doing I hope our new metaphor will resonate better with successful initiatives already underway in the profession to integrate the learning of the macro, molecular, and symbolic nuts and bolts of chemistry with the broader contexts in which chemistry affects the lives of citizens and communities. Five crucial, interlinked areas should benefit from integrating a new emphasis on the human element into treatment of the other three vertices of tetrahedral chemistry education.

macroscopic

human element

macroscopic molecular

symbolic

molecular

symbolic

Figure 4. Adding a new dimension to the triangle of thinking levels to create tetrahedral chemistry education.

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Curriculum Reform Tetrahedral chemistry education highlights the need to connect chemistry to student experience. It provides a clear framework for grounding the macroscopic, molecular, and symbolic dimensions of chemistry curriculum in “real world” problems and solutions, including industrial processes and environmental applications. Highlighting the human element provides strong rationale for emphasizing case studies, active learning, and investigative projects for linking “school chemistry” to everyday life. Well-intentioned efforts toward systemic chemistry curriculum reform often do not catch on because underlying issues regarding how students learn in school settings are not understood or addressed (14). Chemistry education at all levels is embedded in both the culture of schools and the society in which schools are placed. Often that culture and the curriculum that reflects it are hidden, posing barriers to change. This third dimension to our metaphor reminds us to give attention to how students learn and how chemistry connects to the lives of students and the public. My assertion is that both chemistry majors and nonmajors benefit from a balanced emphasis on all four vertices of the tetrahedron, with each group needing to emphasize different facets at various points in their chemistry courses and programs. Many experienced chemistry educators have shown that content and context can go hand-in-hand. Let me illustrate from my own experiences with these two groups.

Chemistry Majors By the time our chemistry majors graduate, those pictures of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide in Figure 3 convey considerable meaning. Majors certainly know what each substance is, that combustion of tetrahedral methane heats their classroom, and they can visualize the combustion product, CO 2 , as a covalently bonded, linear triatomic molecule, with infrared-active vibrational modes and no dipole moment. Some may even recall the degenerate molecular orbitals for carbon dioxide and equilibrium calculations showing how carbon dioxide gas reacts with water to form bicarbonate and carbonate ions. But there are some important things we may not emphasize enough with this group. I have always found it very surprising to learn where first-year chemistry majors think their water comes from, or the electricity that powers their personal computers, or the polymers in the pens they use for taking notes. Few majors have much insight into how research in chemistry gets funded, what the most important industrial processes are, the role of serendipity in discovery, or what pedagogical and problem solving strategies best suit their learning styles. We reinforce that human element with our first-year science majors at The King’s University College by using The Same & Not the Same by Roald Hoffmann (15) as a supplemental required text. Each of our organic chemistry students keeps a weekly journal in which they write, among other things, about the ways they encounter organic chemicals in their everyday lives and the learning strategies that work best for them. Publishers of chemistry texts for majors increasingly provide text and Web-based materials that help students see the relevance of chemistry and tap different learning styles (16).


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Topics, case-studies, and courses in environmental and industrial chemistry can be helpful ways of teaching important concepts while connecting chemistry to the daily experience of our majors. I find students willing to work hard at kinetics, thermodynamics, and free radical reaction mechanisms to obtain a better understanding of stratospheric ozone depletion, photochemical smog, and other topics in atmospheric environmental chemistry. We spend time with our majors on atmospheric warming efficiencies and residence times of N2O, CO2, and CH4. They examine the relative uncertainty in our understanding of the contributions to radiative forcing by molecules and processes other than CO2 (17) and become familiar with the tropospheric vacuum cleaner (hydroxyl radical), calcareous ooze, and mitigative strategies for increasing CO2 levels. I encourage my 21st century chemistry majors to wrestle, as Dimitri Mendeleyev did, with the effect our combustion of fossil fuels may have on the supply of feedstocks for the plastics and polymers our great grandchildren will need. Visiting the oil fields of Pennsylvania and Azerbaijan, Mendeleyev described burning petroleum as a fuel as “akin to firing up a kitchen stove with banknotes” (18).

Nonmajors For the 300 nonmajors I have taught in Chemistry 290 over the past 12 years (about 25 at a time), a strong emphasis on the human element helps students get over their fear of chemistry and gain the confidence they need to tackle challenging topics. In almost every topic this group explores, the symbolic (symbols, equations, calculations) dimension of chemistry creates anxiety and requires special attention—once students have found the motivation and confidence needed to take on the challenge. To help nonmajors like Lee and Andrea connect chemistry to their everyday experience, I try to look through their glasses at those pictures chemists frequently use in Figure 3 (19) and have them imaginatively portray for classmates and others the molecular world as they see it. My goal is to help them make informed decisions as citizens about energy, climate change, pharmaceutical products, polymers, air or water pollution, organic produce at the grocery store, and food additives. We emphasize that the study of chemistry is just a careful examination of how extraordinary ordinary things are (20), if we look at them with lenses of the right magnification (21). In Chemistry 290, the course that introduced Lee and Andrea to our molecular world, we start by taking, and then examining, a breath of fresh air (22). Students look with molecular-level glasses at what is in that breath of air, learning how the composition changes when it is inhaled or exhaled in rural Alberta or Beijing. Then we move up, introducing chemistry of the troposphere and stratosphere, including stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change. We watch those exhaled molecules travel around the world, undergoing chemical and photochemical reactions along the way, and explore the ultimate fate of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. Toxicology, risk assessment, and risk perception are introduced, using the difference between nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide to exemplify how small differences in symbolic representation can lead to huge

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differences in reactivity, atmospheric lifetime, and environmental fate. We find it impossible to deal with the chemistry of air without touching on politics, economics, history, and environmental policy. Holding a lab session in a grocery store, students estimate that the fossil fuel used to transport a banana from Ecuador to Edmonton in February produces more carbon dioxide than the mass of the banana. This result resonates with earlier student calculations showing that the average sport utility vehicle also produces approximately its own mass in carbon dioxide each year. We take advantage of opportunities to explain to both our majors and nonmajors the web of human and environmental connections involving molecules like taxol, DDT, and nicotine (Figure 3). A colorless, odorless, sharp-tasting liquid, nicotine causes vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions when ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through skin. The fatal dose of this alkaloid for an average adult is 60 mg or two drops of pure substance (23), yet many voluntarily expose themselves to low levels over decades. Nicotine’s other face is revealed in its potential for treating Tourette’s syndrome and related brain disorders (24). 1,1,1-Trichloro-2,2-bis(4-chlorophenyl)ethane (DDT), a promising destroyer of disease-bearing pests since World War II, is now a controversial UN-listed priority organic pollutant. Yet DDT (Figure 5) still represents one of the few choices for controlling the anopheles mosquito that carries the dreaded disease of malaria to 270 million people a year around the world, causing several million deaths annually.

Figure 5. Contrasts in DDT: (top) a polarized light photomicrograph of crystalline DDT (courtesy of Molecular Expressions) and (bottom) bottles of the aqueous solution at the grocery store in Asmara, Eritrea, next to the corn flakes.


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This emphasis on the human element helps Lee, Andrea, and other nonmajors make successful and imaginative connections between the chemistry in textbooks and their lives, and provides motivation for deeper understanding of the molecular, symbolic, and macroscopic dimensions of chemistry. They are often eager to communicate this new understanding to others in creative ways that reflect ownership of concepts. Listen to Andrea at the end of Chemistry 290 describing to her classmates her not-so-still life acrylic painting, “Complexity of Life”, in Figure 1. In the acrylic painting everything you see is blurred. Splashes and swirls of color obscure what would usually be a clear, smooth and peaceful image. Molecules are in constant motion. They can travel up to 1000 feet per second and experience up to 400,000,000 collisions with other molecules in that time period. Nothing we look at in nature is simple and peaceful. What makes this world a beautiful and exciting place is its vast complexity. Let’s start at the top of the painting with the sky, marked with blue and splashes of red. Nothing is quiet. Over to the left you can see a UV-C ray hit an oxygen molecule. It breaks it apart and the oxygen atoms fly in different directions. You can still see one oxygen atom, though it is now a free radical and incredibly reactive. It floats around for a while, frantically searching for an oxygen molecule. Finally it gets attached to what it was looking for. It has formed an ozone molecule and is once again happy. But there is never a moment of peace in the air, ‘cause not even a second later, a beam of light comes and destroys a CFC bond. The chlorine atom that gets busted off is very unsatisfied and seeks this brand new ozone molecule…No, if you ever looked at the air around you and thought it was incredibly peaceful you were highly mistaken. If you move farther down the painting you can see a cabin, some trees, a dirt road and a river. If you were to look at this scene in real life you would be fooled into thinking that it too was peaceful. But thousands of chemical reactions are needed to “run” a grape or a tree. When you look at a flower, its chlorophyll is capturing the energy of the sun and using it to combine carbon dioxide gas and water to form molecules like glucose. It is all happening, but it is hard to see…Molecules are constantly transforming and reacting with their surroundings. The next time you venture out into the wilderness or look outside at the sunset over a city, think about the complex way in which our world works, and everything you can’t see that makes it such a beautiful planet.

Processes of Science Recent science literacy initiatives make it clear that providing more science facts to students and the general public is not enough. “ The myths and stereotypes that young people have about science are not dispelled when science teaching focuses narrowly on the laws, concepts, and theories of science,” suggests the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy (25). Key science concepts need to be given in the context of an

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authentic understanding of how scientists go about their work and reach conclusions (26). Both science and nonscience majors benefit from understanding how scientists choose subjects for study, approach those studies, and obtain support for research. Brown suggests that chemists understand the world largely in terms of metaphorical reasoning and communication (27). Our metaphor for describing chemistry education should adequately describe those human influences along with the rules, formulas, and experimental and theoretical data we must also stress in learning chemistry. Demonstrating the process of discovery while clearly showing why the resulting knowledge is relevant to students’ lives is an excellent way to engage undergraduates and bring chemistry to life (28). Discovering the History and Philosophy of Chemistry “One of the characteristics of chemists is that most have no interest in the philosophy of science,” states the inaugural issue of the journal Foundations of Chemistry (29). That feeling of disinterest is mutual, muses the author, as modern philosophers also rarely pay any attention to modern chemistry issues. Few chemists or philosophers have deeply explored topics such as relativism, reductionism, or the social construction of theories in chemistry (30). It is remarkable that so little has been heard about the footprints of chemical ideas—where they come from and where they lead us. This is less true in other sciences, where historical, philosophical, and sociological insights have informed fundamental questions in areas such as cosmology, evolutionary theory, and bioethics. Brush suggests it is fruitful to pay attention to where scientific ideas originate and how they change over time (31). The lives of chemists and citizens are transformed, for good and ill, by pharmaceutical product design, “chemical” weapons fabrication, and industrial-scale green chemistry. Understanding the roots of chemical synthesis and analysis becomes increasingly important as we face global challenges of finding clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and fuel cells to replace combustion of fossil fuels. Focusing on the human element in chemistry education will lend support to those efforts to map the long-neglected historical (32) and philosophical issues that are unique to chemistry, and that have shaped the development of the discipline. Public Understanding and Trust Readers will be aware of the major initiatives by professional associations and industry to increase the public understanding of science and chemistry. In my role as chair of the new IUPAC Public Understanding of Chemistry (PUC) subcommittee, we are evaluating global PUC initiatives and finding that they have very mixed success. The present state of understanding, communication, and trust between chemists and the general public brings to mind images of sheets of graphite, slipping past each other with little interactive effect. Could a new emphasis on the human element by chemists and educators help transform graphite into diamonds?


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Programs to increase the public understanding of chemistry and build public trust need to emphasize the human element as they set goals to:

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Provide citizens with basic understanding of chemistry terms and concepts so they can become meaningfully involved in decision making.

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Assist chemists and the general public in developing a more authentic understanding of the nature of science and the role of science education.

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Acknowledge the duality of benefit and potential harm built right into the fabric of chemistry and the practice of chemists—the fact that any molecule (ozone, nitric oxide, toluene, morphine) may be both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (15).

Educating across Cultures The chemistry profession, especially through the mandate of organizations such as IUPAC, is strongly motivated to reach across cultures with chemistry education. That motivation comes from seeing the indispensable role chemistry and chemistry education play in meeting basic human needs around our globe. But without overt attention to the human element, including an understanding of how people learn and the cultural dimensions to classroom practices and learning objects, we risk using materials ineffectively and inappropriately. In my own research on the use of visualizations in chemistry education, pilot studies indicate that computer models, animations, and simulation materials can be particularly helpful in settings where access to physical models and data from scientific instruments is limited owing to socioeconomic circumstances. Yet students in different cultures may use interactive, constructivist, learning objects in different ways. Thus we are currently investigating ways in which cultural or socioeconomic factors (the human element) may mediate the nature or ultimate success of science visualizations (33). The equations for describing the role for chemistry and chemistry education across cultures and around the globe are

Figure 6. Can Etik, Chemistry is Everywhere, 8 in. x 11 in. watercolor, a 13-year old winner from Turkey in the IUPAC/SAW 2003 poster competition.

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complex. To provide one chemistry teacher in 2018 for some parts of our globe, we need to train four now, as three will have died of AIDS (34). We might begin to solve those complex equations by inviting the next generation to creatively imagine what it is like to live as human beings in a chemical world. Inspiring examples of young student responses to our 2003 IUPAC PUC subcommittee/Science Across the World global poster competition asking them to do this can be found in Figure 6 and the IUPAC Web gallery (35). Beyond inviting imaginative responses to the world, of course, it is our task as educators to work with and equip the world’s students to build a better one. Acknowledgments I wish to thank The King’s University College Chemistry 290 students Andrea Kingma and Lee Andrus, and 13year old Can Etik from Ozel Kalamis School in Turkey for letting us see the world of molecules through their glasses. Note 1. This article is based on the award address for the Chemical Institute of Canada Union Carbide Award for Chemical Education, presently named the CIC Award for Chemical Education. The address was presented at the joint 39th International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Congress and 86th Canadian Society of Chemistry Conference in Ottawa, Ontario on August 11, 2003.

Literature Cited 1. Cushman, Allerton. Chemistry and Civilization; E. P. Dutton and Co.: New York, 1925. 2. Lewontin, R. The Triple Helix, Gene, Organism, and Environment; Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 2000; p 1. 3. Brown, T. L. Making Truth: Metaphor in Science; University of Illinois Press: Urbana, IL, 2003; p 50. 4. Johnstone, A. H. Intl. J. Chem. Educ. 1991, 36, 7–10. 5. (a) Johnstone, A. H. Chemistry Education: Research and Practice in Europe 2000, 1, 9–15. (b) Gabel, D. J. Chem. Educ. 1999, 76, 548. 6. Dori, Y. J.; Barak, M.; Adir, N. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 1084–1092. Dori, Y. J.; Hameiri, M. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 2003, 40, 278–333. Sanger, M. J. Chem. Educ. 2000, 77, 762. 7. Kotz, J.; Treichel, P., Jr. Chemistry and Chemical Reactivity, 5th ed.; Saunders College Publishing: Philadelphia, 2003; pp 11– 21. 8. National Research Council, National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment. National Science Education Standards. Washington: National Academies Press, 1996; pp 177–208. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/4962.html (accessed June 15, 2004). 9. Tasker, R. Uniserve Science News 1998, 9. http:// science.uniserve.edu.au/newsletter/vol9/tasker.html (accessed Sep 2005). 10. Examples include the American Chemistry Council’s essential campaign, described in Chem. Eng. News 2003, July 7, 12 and the Canadian Chemical Producer’s Association Responsible Care Ethic, http://www.ccpa.ca/ResponsibleCare/ (accessed Sep 2005).


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Chemistry for Everyone 11. National Science Foundation. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 2002, Table 7.10. http:// www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/pdfstart.htm (accessed Sep 2005). 12. Two examples include: Moore, J. W.; Stanitski, C.; Wood, J. L.; Kotz, J. C.; Joesten, M. L. The Chemical World: Concepts and Applications, 2nd ed.; Saunders: Philadelphia, 1998. American Chemical Society. Chemistry; Beta Version, W. H. Freeman: New York, 2002. 13. Ramsden, J. Aust. Sci. Teachers J. 1992, 38, 13–18. Yager, R. Sci. Educ. 1985, 69, 143–144. 14. Van Berkel, B.; De Vos, W.; Verdonk, A.; Pilot, A. Sci. Educ. 2000, 9, 123–159. 15. Hoffmann, R. The Same and Not the Same; Columbia University Press: New York, 1995. 16. For example, McGraw Hill’s Online Learning Centre for Organic Chemistry, 5th ed., includes articles from the New York Post about organic chemicals in the news. http:// highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072424583/student_view0/ index.html (accessed Sep 2005). 17. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http:// www.ipcc.ch (accessed Sep 2005). 18. Stanitski, C. L.; Eubanks, L. P.; Middlecamp, C. H.; Pienta, N. J. Chemistry in Context, 4th ed.; McGraw Hill: Boston, 2003; p 186. 19. Mahaffy, P. G. Alberta Sci. Educ. J. Special Issue on Chemistry Education 2003, 36 (1), 9–16. 20. Snyder, C. The Extraordinary Chemistry of Ordinary Things, 4th ed.; Wiley: New York, 2002. 21. The Molecular Expressions Web site has one example of a powerful visualization of scale, moving by powers of ten from the Milky Way through space toward the earth, reaching the leaves of an oak tree, and finally showing the subatomic universe of electrons and protons in a leaf. Parry-Hill, M. J.; Burdett, C. A.; Davidson, M. W. National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/ primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/ (accessed Sep 2005). 22. Stanitski, C. L.; Eubanks, L. P.; Middlecamp, C. H.; Pienta, N. J. Chemistry in Context, 4th ed.; McGraw Hill: Boston, 2003; pp 3–20. In Chemistry 290 we extend considerably the

approach in Chapter 1. 23. Sax’s Dangerous Properties of Industrial Materials, 10th ed.; Lewis, R. J., Ed.; Wiley: New York, 2000; Vol. 3, p 2637. Center for Disease Control (NIOSH). http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ idlh/54115.html (accessed Sep 2005). 24. Brennan, M. B. Chem. Eng. News 2000, 78 (13), 23–26. 25. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy; Oxford University Press: New York, 1993. 26. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Project 2061. http://www.project2061.org (accessed Sep 2005). 27. Brown, T. L. Making Truth: Metaphor in Science; University of Illinois Press: Urbana, IL, 2003; pp 50, 190–196. 28. Mahaffy, P. G. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 767–773. 29. Good, R. J. Foundations of Chemistry 1999, 1, 65–69. 30. Nye, M. J. In Chemical Sciences in the Modern World; Mauskopf, S. H., Ed.; University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1993; pp 3–24. 31. Brush, S. Science 1974, 183, 1164–1172. 32. An excellent example is the Chemical Heritage Foundation, with a mission to “treasure the past, educate the present, and inspire the future.” http://www.chemheritage.org/ (accessed Sep 2005). 33. Mahaffy, P. G.; Lerman, Z.; Lewis, N.; Tarasova, N.; Martin, B.; Joldersma, C.; Willson, L. Cross-Cultural Issues in Building Science Education Capacity Through Visualizations in Chemistry and Physics: Report on NSF MiniGrant at the 2003 Gordon Research Conference on Visualization. http:// www.soton.ac.uk/~ecchemed/grc/minigrants.htm (accessed Sep 2005). 34. Statement by A. Pokrovsky at the 2003 IUPAC/CSC Joint Congress, Ottawa, Ontario. 35. It’s a Chemical World Poster Competition, sponsored by IUPAC’s Committee on Chemical Education and Science Across the World. Chemistry International, 25(6) Nov./Dec. 2003, cover, editorial and p 4–8, available at http:// www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2003/2506/index.html (accessed Sep 2005).; Web gallery for posters at http://www.iupac.org/ images/poster/ (accessed Sep 2005).

This article is featured on the cover of this issue. See page 3 of the table of contents for a description of the cover.

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Moving Chemistry Education into 3D: A ... - ACS Publications

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