In this experiment, the students explore the synthesis of a crystalline solid-state material, barium zirconate (BaZrO3) by two different synthetic methods: (a) the wet chemical method using BaCl[subscript 2]·2H[subscript 2]O and ZrOCl[subscript 2]·8H[subscript 2]O as the precursors, and (b) the solid-state reaction from BaCO[subscript 3] and…

Misconceptions are the "the old, the bad, and the ugly" prior knowledge, ideas or conceptions that the learners have that hinder their further learning in science. Several types of misconceptions that undergraduate students hold about reaction coordinate diagrams (from here on we use the term "reaction coordinate diagrams" and…

The Distributed Drug Discovery (D3) program trains students in three drug discovery disciplines (synthesis, computational analysis, and biological screening) while addressing the important challenge of discovering drug leads for neglected diseases. This article focuses on implementation of the synthesis component in the second-semester…

A first-year undergraduate course that introduces students to chemistry through a conceptually detailed description of quantum mechanics is outlined. Quantization as arising from the confinement of a particle is presented and these ideas are used to introduce the reasons behind resonance, molecular orbital theory, degeneracy of electronic states,…

We studied the use of online molecular dynamics simulations (MD) to enhance student abilities to understand the atomic processes governing plastic deformation in materials. The target population included a second-year undergraduate engineering course in the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. The objectives of the study were to…