Promoting Chemistry

„Words, mere words..." says Shakespeare's hero Troilus in „Troilus and Cressida". We can tell much - but we teach better with examples, with experiments related to everyday life.
The CITIES team has developed a set of selected "mobile" experiments with accompanying Power Point presentation slides, lists of material needed and a model suitcase ("sample case") to carry them to wherever you want to show them.
We call this idea "Promoting chemistry from a sample case".

The CITIES team developed a model "sample case" which carries all the material needed for the simple "mobile" experiments. This is how the model case looks like - it was assembled using transport cases that can be found in a do-it-yourself-market. The proposed inventory of the sample case is found here. With the material contained in the case, a number of experiments beyond the two standard presentations can be performed. A list of experiments covering the fields of daily life, kitchen, analytical and clinical chemistry shows how the scope of this presentation and experimental tool can be expanded. The list comes with brief descriptions of the experiments. To facilitate your work, we produced a set of Power Point slides to go with the experiments.

We suggest two standard versions of Power Point presentations which you find here as downloads. You may change, amend or shorten them as needed:

• A day in the life of a chemist
• Kitchen Chemistry

A pdf-version of a publication describing "A day in the life of a chemist" is found here.

Soon, a video of such a presentation will be found here for download, to show how it might look like.

As an example how an analytical technique can be introduced in the classroom, we developed a brief presentation on titrations, showing that and why "titration is what counts", and giving some easily interpreted images of what one mole is.

We invite all colleagues to send us material which they develop - we will gladly put in on line to expand and enrich the scope of experiments. Please keep in mind that for this section the experiments shall be simple, easy to handle and normally restricted to materials which are non-toxic and not dangerous when used in a public presentation.