Calculating analytical uncertainties as a part of method validation is a relevant aspect of field and laboratory practices in instrumental analytical chemistry subjects, which usually require complex algorithms. This work describes the development and didactic use of an automatic and straightforward informatics tool, implemented in an Excel macro,…

In all fields of chemistry, it has become essential to use quantum chemical calculations and machine learning for explaining and predicting chemical phenomena. However, it is challenging to apply textbook knowledge to practical research. In this study, we developed teaching material based on computational chemistry to promote the integration of…

Ion transport, involving the diffusion and migration of ions within the electrolyte, stands as a fundamental concept in electrochemistry and serves as the driving force for electrochemical reactions. Electric double layers are critical in the fields of electrochemical energy storage and chemical conversion, constituting a central focus of…

As smartphones have become a part of our everyday life, their sensors have successfully been used to allow data acquisition with these readily available devices in a variety of different smartphone-based school experiments. Such experiments most commonly take advantage of the accelerometer and gyroscope. A less frequently used sensor in…

Background: Clustered randomized controlled trials are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. Frequently, stratified or paired designs are adopted in practice. Fogarty (2018) studied variance estimators for stratified and not clustered experiments and Schochet et. al. (2022) studied that for stratified, clustered RCTs with…

Benzoin, an [alpha]-hydroxy ketone, is stereoselectively reduced by sodium borohydride to yield hydrobenzoin, the stereochemistry of which is determined by acetalization and analysis of the derivative by NMR spectroscopy. This classical experiment has been enhanced by modern spectroscopic and computational analysis to enable students to…

The presented article is dedicated to a new way of teaching substitution in algebra. In order to effectively master the subject matter, it is necessary for students to perceive the equal sign equivalently, to learn to manipulate expressions as objects, and to perceive and use transformations based on defining their own equivalences. According to…

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related restrictions forced the reorganization of learning methodology and gave a central role to remote learning. Laboratory experiments are the most affected activity, and several alternatives were described. This work proposes to create calculation tools by simply programming in Visual Basic of Excel to emulate the…

In general, undergraduate experimental physics laboratories do not usually have experiments designed to address rolling friction and to measure the value of the rolling friction coefficient. This work explores an experiment, which has the potential to arouse students' curiosity about rolling friction by addressing a counterintuitive aspect of the…

A simple experiment is described to compare the descent time between two vertically separated points when an object slides down tracks of varying shape. A surprising result is that the descent time is shortest when it follows a circular track rather than a cycloidal track. Cycloidal tracks are usually predicted to result in the shortest descent…

The acid-catalyzed dehydration of regioisomeric methylcyclohexanols is a classic organic chemistry experiment featured in a variety of laboratory textbooks and literature. The mechanistic details of this reaction have received an inconsistent and occasionally inaccurate treatment, wherein the reaction has been described as a mix of E1, E2-like,…

Enzymes are nature's catalysts, mediating chemical processes in living systems. The study of enzyme function and mechanism includes defining the maximum catalytic rate and affinity for substrate/s (among other factors), referred to as enzyme kinetics. Enzyme kinetics is a staple of biochemistry curricula and other disciplines, from molecular and…

As simple and ubiquitous redox-active organic molecules, quinones participate in diverse electron transfer processes in chemistry and biological systems for energy transformation and signal transduction. We introduce here a practical exercise to study the redox potentials of benzoquinone and its two derivatives by combining the electrochemistry…

A computational experiment investigating common organic chemistry mechanisms has been developed and implemented in a junior/senior-level physical chemistry laboratory course at two institutions. Students investigated various reactions that proceed via S[subscript N]1, S[subscript N]2, E1, and E2 mechanisms using hybrid Density Functional Theory…

Randomized A/B tests allow causal estimation without confounding but are often under-powered. This paper uses a new dataset, including over 250 randomized comparisons conducted in an online learning platform, to illustrate a method combining data from A/B tests with log data from users who were not in the experiment. Inference remains exact and…