We've continued to beaver away at the Learn Chemistry site and systems over the last few months, and the results of some of that work went live last week to our students and teachers of chemistry around the world. Here's a short update to keep our users in the loop.

The systems powering Learn Chemistry are now more robust and reliable. We also think it's made searching and browsing our thousands of chemistry resources a little faster!

We've added a 'null search'. You can now hit search on Learn Chemistry without entering a search phrase to get a listing of everything in that category. For instance, select ‘information and data’ and hit 'Search', and you’ll get all 2101 substance and other information items.

Faces of chemistry Careers with chemistry page is live. We've embedded the National Stem Centre careers widget into the page, loaded with science career results. Reach the Faces of Chemistry site via the ‘More’ menu at the top of every page.
 
We've also squashed a couple of strange bugs, and made some other behind-the-scenes improvements. Those hidden changes will soon become more visible when we add exciting new functions to our flagship home for chemistry education later this year!

The periodic table. It’s what everyone associates with chemistry and rightly so. It is one of the key pieces of ‘equipment’ in any chemistry class. So it’s not surprising that our most popular resource on Learn Chemistry is our interactive Visual Elements Periodic Table (VEPT), with around 70,000 people using it every month.

We are delighted that so many students and teachers are already making use of some of the amazing features – from podcasts to historical facts – that VEPT has to offer. But we want to know which features are particularly useful in your classroom and which bits are most popular with your students. This way we can make sure that we can make it even better.

When we launched the 2^nd phase of VEPT back in October last year, we were excited when Professor Martyn Poliakoff gave us the go ahead to feature his extremely popular series – the Periodic Table of videos – in our own periodic table. Professor Poliakoff himself presents this series of short films, which was shot by Brady Haran and features scientists from the University of Nottingham, in an engaging and entertaining way. In the videos, he explores each of the 118 elements through spectacular demonstrations and easy-to-follow explanations.

It’s been just over half a year since we added the videos to our periodic table, and Professor Poliakoff and Nottingham’s scientists are curious about what people think of them. They’d love to hear your feedback on their videos and how you use them in the classroom, so they put together a short survey.

The survey only has ten questions – so if you’ve got a few minutes spare, please do let them know what you think!



The charismatic Professor Martyn Poliakoff talking about gold, inside the gold bullion vault

Whilst we’re on the subject of the periodic table, I should also let you know about some of the exciting new plans that we are working on at the moment. All good things come in threes, so we’re working hard to plan out a third phase of new developments and exciting additions to our periodic table.

Some of the new features we are working on are a scarcity tab to highlight the uses and threats to rare earth elements, bringing in even more video content, and perhaps even creating a periodic table in different languages.
No doubt these will keep us busy for a while. But of course we always welcome ideas from our users. So do get in touch to let us know what you would like to see in our next periodic table update.

June’s newest legacy resource has been added to Learn Chemistry, although this time we’ve gone for a Higher Education direction. Communicating Chemistry is designed to help undergraduates develop a variety of communication skills in their degree courses.

Title of exercise	Key feature(s)
The Fluorofen Problem	Team problem solving
Scientific Paper Workshop	Comprehension/Problem solving
Computer Keyboard Skills	Basic computer skills
World Wide Web Treasure Hunt	Information retrieval
New Chemist Article	Writing a concise report
Dictionary of Interesting Chemistry	Information retrieval/Concise report wiring
Hwuche-Hwuche Bark	Team work/Problem solving
Annual Review Presentation	Oral presentations
Interviews and Interviewing	Interview skills
Poster Presentations	Preparing posters

 
There are two key themes underpinning the design of the book. Firstly, as communication skills are learnt rather than taught, the exercises provide students with many opportunities for first hand practice and experience. Secondly, the exercises are all set in a chemistry context, so students see the skills as interesting and relevant, and are encouraged to discover, explain and use chemistry. The aspects of communication skills identified in the pack are:

• information retrieval;
• written delivery; 
• visual delivery;
• oral delivery;
• team work; and
• problem solving.

Each section includes a summary, including background and proposed timetable, information for students and a detailed tutor guide.

The exercises typically require approximately two hours of contact teaching and ten hours total work from the students. A whole module could be run using some or all of the exercise, or each exercise stands alone.

Hopefully, these resources will help students grasp some important skills, not necessarily taught with chemistry in mind!