In this session we will review the topics that will be discussed during the Chemical Education sessions here at FAME. We will discuss our hopes for building the chemical education community in Florida through integration and collaboration between secondary and post-secondary faculty.

Demand for a highly-trained STEM workforce is garnering increasingly urgent notice, and national efforts call on the development of talent from all sectors, including underrepresented minorities. According to the National Research Council (NRC) panel, the ingredients for inclusive success in STEM are the “acquisition of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind; opportunities to put these into practice; a developing sense of competence and progress; motivation to be in, a sense of belonging to, or self-identification with the field; and information about stages, requirements, and opportunities.” Addressing these requirements for freshmen STEM majors in a first-year experience course has potential to staunch the outflow of students from STEM fields. Strategies for Success (SLS 1501) is 3-credit elective cours, with the focus on helping students transition to collegiate life. Recently, a pilot section of SLS-1501 was offered exclusively to STEM majors to focus more narrowly on strategies for success in STEM majors and aimed to achieve the goals set by the NRC for inclusive success in STEM. The focus of this research is to evaluate the merit of the course – through analysis of the scientific reasoning exams administered in the course, surveys of the students who completed the course, and through following the progress of the students in their chosen majors over time.

This presentation will share examples on how to incorporate green chemistry experiments in the IB curriculum.

As an emerging technology, three-dimensional (3D) printing has gained much attention as a rapid prototyping and small-scale manufacturing technology around the world. 3D printing provides a new creative and innovative platform for almost every discipline in education and research including STEM disciplines. Engineering disciplines use 3D printing to make models of new machines, robots, and other prototypes. 3D printing has a substantial impact on the field of chemical education as well. 3D printed interactive models of the Bohr Model of the atom, bond polarity, and hybridization is a great learning tool for students to explore the atomic theory. 3D models also have been used to teach orbital theory as well as VSEPR theory in the classroom and laboratory. 3D printed crystal structures became valuable teaching tools for the instructors. This presentation will include basics of 3D printing and their applications in chemical education as well as emerging benefits and risks involved.

AACT Education Resource Specialist Jenn Parsons will introduce the national membership organization by and for K–12 teachers of chemistry, while highlighting its goals, member benefits, and opportunities to get involved.

The Ruben’s tube is a commonly-used physics demonstration that uses fire to visualize longitudinal acoustic standing waves.  We report on extended applications of this classic demonstration that offer a relatively inexpensive (and exciting!) means by which advanced physical chemistry topics can be explored.  One application involves the analysis of speed of sound in both methane and propane, the results of which qualitatively agree with the expected relative speed of sound within the two gases. We will report on our findings, as well as our work involved in better understanding the quantitative data obtained in the experiments. This work is part of the larger STACT (Science and Technical Arts Collaborative Teaching) project, an initiative encouraging collaborations between science and technical arts teachers in Florida’s secondary school system.

Long before “hands-on/minds-on” became a cliché, it was generally recognized that learning is a tactile process. We can lament the inexorable migration of science teaching from the laboratory to the computer screen, but consider how technology has improved education for students who are physically impaired. There is no doubt that touch screens and specialized software helped make great strides in SPecial EDucation (SPED), but at what cost in the STEM fields where modeling scientific relationships often starts with building physical models, and equipment is constructed to test scientific constructs. We will describe a grassroots approach to designing, building, and testing “building blocks” specifically for SPED students. The potential for using these blocks as simple molecular models will also be discussed, including broader implications and caveats for the simple models generally used to illustrate molecular structure in introductory chemistry courses.