Instructors/Faculty
Information
Your students
arrive in your chemistry class with an enormous diversity
of background. What if the
instructional material teaching the concepts of chemistry
linked to many of their common experiences?
Wouldn't it become
easier to make an impact, to have active learning,
showing how chemistry impacts the mainstream of our
lives?
ChemCases.com
units are freely available for your use. They link
chemical concepts taught in General Chemistry to
responsible decision making in our society.
The cases provide
a ready resource of capsules of knowledge that challenge
and entertain your students. They provide you with
a continuing, thematic source of auxiliary material to
supplement your instruction.
Cases Available:
 Alcohol,
Chemistry and You
Gatorade
NutraSweet
Silicones
Nuclear
Chemistry and the Community
Cisplatin
and Cancer
Refrigerants
for the 21st Century
Olestra
Drug
Pathways and Chemical Concepts
Fuels
and Society a. Chemistry and History of Automotive Fuels
Fuels and
Society b. Sixty Years of Tetraethyllead
Fuels and
Society c. How Lead was Finally Removed from Gasoline
What
is ChemCases.com availability?
How
do I use ChemCases.com?
What
is ChemCases Pedagogy?
How do ChemCases.com Integrate
into the chemistry concepts in the curriculum?
05/09/04
|
|
What is ChemCases.com?
ChemCases.com
is a web-based resource of curriculum supplements
for teaching the second semester general
chemistry course.
Each
case study features a number of the basic
principles covered in a traditional general
chemistry curriculum. We use these concepts to
address the decisions that influence development
of successful consumer, agricultural and
pharmaceutical products.
General
Chemistry Topics Taught
in the Second Semester
1.
Properties of Solutions
2.
Chemical Equilibrium
3. Acids
and Bases
4. Salts
in Water
5.
Thermodynamics
6.
Electrochemistry
7.
Kinetics
8. Main
Group Elements, Groups 1-4
9. Main
Group Elements, Groups 5-8
10. The
d-Block Elements
11. Nuclear
Chemistry
12.
Carbon-based materials
|
- Decisions Affecting
Innovation
- Structure-property
relationships
- Environmental
constraints
- Toxicology
issues
- Patent rights
- Economic
considerations
- Competition
in the marketplace
- Social and
cultural diversity
|
Why ChemCases?
ChemCases
provide immediate relevancy -- an instant linkage between
familiar products and events and the chemistry underlying
their existence. ChemCases explain the benign and
explore the controversial, raising our science of
chemistry into the mainstream of the flow of decision
making.
1.
Students come to ChemCases from everywhere. Many of them struggle to
squeeze education into a fully committed life of work
and family.
2. They
demand a curriculum that adds meaning to their lives now;
they are impatient
with any content that fails to deliver an immediate
impact.
3.
Chemistry must reach a diverse student population, a population bombarded
with the intellectual and sensual imagery of our
culture
4.
Students will move on to a seemingly
unlimited inventory of other educational offerings if
chemistry fails to catch their immediate attention.
5.
ChemCases.com provides a foundation for learning
chemical science through its links to familiar products and events.
How
do ChemCases Educate?
- ChemCase
pedagogy includes:
- 1. Case-based
content in
which students are instroduced to real
products and events. ChemCases link product
development,
the underlying chemistry,
and the decisions
faced by
developers as the product was established
and maintained;
2.
A concept-based
process
that is ideally suited for electronic
presentation. ChemCases are based on concept
maps -- the expression
of ideas linked by their relationship to
each other. The concepts in turn generate
unique, self-contained case
capsules;
3. An
increasing cognitive demand
requiring the student to move beyond
simply knowing and understanding
chemistry. The capsules introduce
chemical facts and event history at the
beginning of the case. ChemCases apply
the science to problems of development,
then analyze and evaluate chemistry and
its role in the problems and
opportunities in the events that follow.
As the case flows toward its conclusion,
the documents become more complex, less
unequivocal. Students must understand the
knowledge, then apply it and, finally,
work to evaluate conflicting and
contradictory data to respond to a Case
Discussion unit; and
4. A promise
or covenant
between student, instructor and author
that patient, daily attention to the
curriculum will result in a successful
conclusion.
|
|
About ChemCases.com ChemCases.com is a series of
curriculum units that link responsible decision making in
product development with chemical principles taught in
General Chemistry.
We expect ChemCases.com
curriculum supplements will lead interested students
toward the sciences, medicine, pharmacy and engineering
by:
Developing
Knowledge of
how the tools of chemistry are used in the service of
society
Comprehension of the conflicting information
necessary to move an idea to the marketplace
Application of this information to show how
chemical principles are used to make decisions
Evaluation of the data to synthesize
solutions to technical and non technical challenges
© 2000 Kennesaw State University.
Principal Investigator Laurence Peterson; Project Director Matthew Hermes.
NSF Grant DUE-9652889
|
