Chemistry

Dr Fiona Dickinson, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath, explains her use of concept bite videos in a concept bite video. This is a recorded version of  a case study presentation at a Director of Studies...

This case study from Chemistry, is part of a series providing short summaries of some of the different good practice models and approaches taken to department level support for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). The Department of Chemistry moved GTA training...

Understanding the structure of a compound or material is central to the learning goals in many areas of science and engineering including chemistry, pharmacology, materials and chemical engineering, and biochemistry. But structures are three dimensional and conceptually difficult to understand through the normal two-dimensional learning formats of lectures, lecture notes, textbooks and whiteboards. This 2013-14 project provided access to software and extensive database resources to all undergraduate and postgraduate students, undertaking Chemistry and Natural Science degrees, to allow them to view and manipulate structures in three dimensions using departmental computer resources and their own laptops, computers, tablets and smartphones.

The aim of this 2013-14 project was to generate large banks of applied numeracy Moodle questions to support the teaching of basic maths in Biochemistry and Chemistry. We employed and trained six students studying these subjects to create new randomised question banks in Moodle XML using PHP. Mathematical expressions were coded in LaTeX for MathJax, so that when displayed in Moodle, they would be fully accessible in all browsers, on small screens and can be magnified or read aloud if required.