Learning about our world.
My colleague Carly Reed and I just published some work related to teaching general chemistry during the pandemic. Like many others, we implemented a variety of technological tools to facilitate on-line and hybrid instruction. During the process, we monitored student engagement with the various tools and followed up with some student surveys to identify which tools might be worth keeping in “back to normal” instruction.
After many years of planning, the ACS Northeast Regional Meeting happened (or, I guess, is happening as I type). NERM 2022 was supposed to be NERM 2020 before COVID-19 had something to say. The bad news is that the symposium I had planned on 3D printing more or less fell apart as many of the speakers I was able to recruit in 2020 had moved on and were not interested in presenting this year. Still, I came away from the symposium with some very exciting ideas about 3D printed functional materials that I cannot wait to try out in the lab.
On the other hand, the good news is that one of my newest students, Kashane Miller, was able to present her summer research for the first time in a professional setting.
Kashane’s summer research is on using a home-build turbidity meter to study nucleation kinetics. She is developing an experiment that uses student-built instrumentation to explore chemical phenomena. Her work is interesting in useful because it shows that we can reproduce literature results on the nucleation kinetics of calcium oxalate and mimic the results from a commercial instrument. Further, she demonstrates that the custom built instrument can help students understand the role of data processing – in this case using a low pass filter – to improve data quality. She has also discovered that we need to rethink our overly simplified sample holder, since the data now have this unexpected dependence on the volume of liquid in the sample cell. (We are probably getting reflection and refraction effects from the round vial.)
So congrats, Kashane, on a job well done.
The big project this summer has been advancing my skills in amateur radio. After my Christmas visit to my family last year, I caught Dad’s amateur radio bug (fortunately, I didn’t catch any COVID bug). I obtained my general license in February and was able to pick up a used Kenwood TS-570S radio. After drilling a few holes in my office wall and tossing fishing line into nearby trees, I was up and running with an antenna that will tune to all the amateur bands (more or less).
I’ve already documented some of my early summer adventures like building a key for Morse code operation and having fun sending QSL cards. I finished off the summer with a trip back to my parents and an opportunity to do some combo work.
I’m giving a research talk at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, which is being hosted by Purdue University. The presentation is on developing a curriculum for analytical chemistry based upon building scientific instruments using the M4 Express microcontroller. I mentioned a few links in the talk and here they are for those who snapped a picture of the QR code:
Some pics and other relevant info will follow the talk.
A few people have expressed interest in this project, so I figured I would put together a whitepaper highlighting what problems I’m trying to solve with FeAtHEr-Cm, how I plan to go about doing it, and how others can participate. If you fall in to this category, take a look.