Chemistry students often struggle in organic chemistry courses. In fact, these courses are viewed by some as "weed-out" classes. There are many fundamental concepts covered in general chemistry that contribute to students' ability to succeed in organic chemistry. One of those fundamental topics, and the focus of this study, is the topic…

General Chemistry serves virtually all STEM students. It has been accused of covering content in a "mile wide and inch deep" fashion. This has made it very difficult to assess, where chemistry educators have relied on assessments of specific topics. Assessing across all these different topics requires introducing many different chemical…

This article reports a workshop from the 2021 IUBMB/ASBMB Teaching Science with Big Data conference held virtually in June 2021 where participants learned to explore and visualize large quantities of protein PBD data using Jupyter notebooks and the Python programming language. This activity instructs participants using Jupyter notebooks, Python…

Across science disciplines, light is a common tool for measuring, characterizing, and catalysing molecules and molecular processes. Despite the ubiquity of light-based tools, little research has been done to investigate how students understand light and light-matter interactions (LMI). This topic is typically first introduced in first-year…

It is widely argued that Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (NST) is going to affect several aspects of our life. Therefore, students need to develop their nanoliteracy to cope with the everyday issues related to NST. Although there is an increasing interest in introducing NST content to primary school students, the theoretical frameworks for…

This article describes a simple way to introduce nanomaterials using the presence of carbon nanodots (CNDs) in widely available food. Budweiser® beer and Coca-Cola®, commercial foods that are commonly accessible, were utilized to demonstrate the optical property of nanoparticles. Specifically, green and violet laser pointers were employed for the…

Nanotechnology has been recognized as an important driver of the future economy, and so nanoscience is increasingly being incorporated into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. This experiment includes the chemical synthesis, optical and chemical testing, and microscopic imaging of gold nanoparticles. Since nanoparticles are too small to…

The range of abstract concepts encountered when learning chemistry and the inability of students to make connections between the macroscopic, sub-microscopic, and symbolic representations, used in chemistry teaching, are believed to be the main reasons for students' difficulty when learning chemistry. Prediction and determination of molecular…

Molecular representations that show chemical bonding are ubiquitous in general and organic chemistry. These help in communicating chemistry concepts that are fundamental to understanding "how" and "why" molecules interact. The goal of this dissertation work is to offer an evidence-based report on the affordances and limitations…

Modeling an inter-ring torsional profile of a simple2,2'-bithiophenemolecule has been used to illustrate the main concepts associated with basic molecular modeling within an introductory course in a master's degree on computational modeling. The methodology proposed in the activity has been used to guide and train the student along the classical…

This is a fundamental and pedagogical work in quantum physics/chemistry, where we try to illustrate the Mulliken's question, "What are the electrons really doing in molecules?". And we also briefly review the development of the most popular numerical approaches in computational chemistry. We examine in a novel approach, how we can…

DNA structure has been leveraged in a variety of facets that allow scientists to perform a range of assays, including ones for identification of species, establishing evolutionary relationships between taxa, or even identifying individuals. Here, we present a DNA barcoding method as practical, hands-on approach that connects several experimental…

In contrast to a macroscopic solid, the color and spectroscopic properties of gold nanoparticles change with size. Here, we propose a teaching platform for high school students (hereafter defined as students, attending secondary school in Europe, preparatory high schools in the US, or any educational institution of a comparable level) that…

Iodonium zwitterions are hypervalent iodine compounds in which the iodine center binds to two substituents and carries a positive formal charge which is compensated by a negative charge within the same molecule. Under thermodynamic conditions, iodonium zwitterion sallow concerted nucleophilic aromatic substitutions to be performed, followed by…

This is an easy and cheap experiment where chemistry Masters students can evaluate the role of some metal ions (i.e., Cu[superscript II] and Mn[superscript II]) in dopamine oxidation, related to Parkinsonism. The required prior knowledge is being familiar with the basis of UV-vis spectroscopy. Details of the activity, including procedure and…