That’s Alder Folks!

This year we reacted the anthracene diene with two different dienophiles in addition to the classic maleic anhydride. The Bruice Organic Chemistry textbook has the Diels-Alder reaction in Chapter 7 which is pretty early for most textbooks. The two new dienophiles were N-phenylmaleimide and Z-diethyl maleate. It turns out there are at least four maleate [...]

For the Love of Grades

I have developed an analogy that describes some of my feeling about assigning grades. When I was of dating age, I used to hear a lot about the different expectations of men and women in a dating relationship. Men desire physical intimacy, usually described as “sex.” Women desire emotional intimacy, usually described as “love.” The [...]

Lecture + Lab versus Lecture or Lab

We currently have a system where first semester organic chemistry lecture and laboratory is counted as one 5 credit course. The lab is considered to account for one of those five credits. As a result, the lab grade is worth 20% of the course grade. In many schools, organic chemistry lecture is a separate course [...]

MACTLAC 2009

The 2009 meeting of the Midwest Association for Chemistry Teachers at Liberal Arts Colleges (MACTLAC) was held at Hope College. The theme this year was “Integration of Research into Teaching: Improving Learning Through Research.” Plenary sessions were led by Lorna Jarvis (Hope), Nancy Kerner (U of MI), and Don Wink (UIC).  Of most interest to [...]

Summer Undergraduate Research Experience

Last week Dominican University hosted a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience for community college sophomores who wanted a week-long assortment laboratory experiences. For my part, we did an analysis of energy drinks. This experiment was adapted from the “caffeine extraction” sophomore organic chemistry laboratory sequence. First, we did a colorimetric array for each of 6 different [...]

Instrumentation

All of us would agree that exposing students to routine organic chemistry analytic instruments is an important part of Organic Chemistry laboratory. However, instrument use by the students gets more problematic as student population grows. 1a) Ideally, students would run their own analysis (with appropriate supervision) as part of the experiment just like they do [...]

The Perils of Doing Experiments in Groups

A recent article in “The Teaching Professor” (August-September 2008 ) entitled “Poorly Designed Group Work” caught my eye this past month. Basically, the author says that many undergraduate group projects are not designed to be successful learning experiences. At some schools, group work in pairs (or larger groups) in chemistry laboratory sections is quite routine. Sometimes an [...]

Class Data Analysis

Data analysis will play a larger role in the new collaborative Organic Chemistry curriculum. I performed three experiments Fall 2007 where students entered their data before leaving the lab. The students were then directed to analyze the “class data” as part of their lab report. This is typically not done in traditional experiments for unknown [...]

Week 10: Synthesis of Chemiluminescent Esters

1) Source(s) This lab was developed by a team of students from a recent JCE article: “Synthesis of Chemiluminescent Esters: A Combinatorial Synthesis Experiment for Organic Chemistry Students,” Duarte, Robert; Nielsen, Janne T.; Dragojlovic, Veljko. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81, 1010. A good resource for this experiment is a website: “Chemiluminescence of Oxalate Esters” http://www.chem.leeds.ac.uk/delights/texts/VV_exp_26.htm [...]

Week 7: Identification of a Conjugated Diene from Eucalyptus Oil

This experiment was adapted by a group of 4 students from: Lehman, J. W., Lehman, J. W., Operational organic chemistry, & 3rd. (2004). Microscale operational organic chemistry : A problem-solving approach to the laboratory course. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Prentice Hall. This was an interesting find, I thought. I have done a couple of [...]