Tools for Discovery-Based Organic Chemistry - Simple Gas Chromatographs and Integrators

日益增长的国民意识表明，传统的化学教学方式往往无法向学生传达实习化学家所经历的科学的兴奋和智力挑战。一种解决这一担忧的新兴模式在化学课程的早期引入了发现。学生证明讲课材料有效性的验证性实验被合作练习所取代，这些练习旨在让学生自己发现科学的基本概念。然后，这些实验室发现将作为课堂讨论的起点。百年学院化学系致力于这种基于发现的教学方法。基于发现的教学，特别是在有机化学中，广泛依赖于仪器。该项目在几个基于发现的实验中使用了一些简单的气相色谱仪和积分器。有机实验的目的是让学生研究物理性质与结构的相关性，以及控制亲核取代的参数。除了这些依赖于气相色谱能力来分离和定量的仪器外，这些仪器还被用作其他实验的准备工具。最后，简单、坚固耐用的气相色谱仪的设计使得在更高注册的入门课程中引入几个使用这种仪器的实验成为可能。

A growing national awareness indicates that traditional ways of teaching chemistry often fail to communicate to students the excitement and intellectual challenge of the science experienced by practicing chemists. One emerging model that addresses this concern introduces discovery early in the chemistry curriculum. Verification experiments where students prove the validity of lecture material are replaced by cooperative exercises designed to allow students to discover for themselves fundamental concepts of the science. These laboratory discoveries then serve as the starting point for lecture discussions. The Department of Chemistry at Centenary College has committed itself to this discovery-based method of teaching. Discovery-based teaching, especially in organic chemistry, depends extensively on instrumentation. This project makes use of a number of simple gas chromatographs and integrators in several discovery-based experiments. Organic experiments are designed to allow students to investigate the correlation of physical properties with structure, and the parameters that govern nucleophilic substitution. In addition to these that depend on gas chromatography's power to separate and quantitate, the instruments also are being used as preparative tools in other experiments. Finally, the simple, rugged design of the gas chromatographs makes it possible to introduce several experiments using this instrumentation into the higher enrollment introductory course.