Overwhelmed by the available chemistry resources? Looking for new chemistry teaching ideas? Elementary Articles is the place for chemistry, education, and everything else.

Elementary Articles is the official blog for the RSC's Learn Chemistry – your home for chemistry education resources and activities.

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Archive for June, 2014
More news from the Learn Chemistry development team. We've been busy on visible and not-so-visible improvements, which went live last week. 
 
  • Learn Chemistry has a new flatter, cleaner, design. We'll soon be making slight adjustments to this design, and expanding it across our range of learn chemistry sites (including Faces of Chemistry, Online Experimentation, and our Periodic Table).
  • The homepage has some new features, including faster access to our websites in a dedicated list, a focus on our users (students, teachers, and Higher Education), a simpler highlights panel, and a calendar widget to get your On this day in Chemistry fix.
  • Simplified search and browse tools. User feedback has shown that resource search or browse results are hard to use or filter. We've acted on that to simplify this experience.
  • We’ve added our PhET partnership to the homepage. Click to view all the chemistry sims produced in collaboration with the lovely folk at UC Boulder.
  • The RNIB audited our site late last year. We've made the first of what we hope will be a series of accessibility improvements.
  • We've squashed a few pesky bugs.
Finally, some housekeeping. Observant readers may have noticed the Elementary Articles blog was unavailable for a few days. Apologies for any disruption, but we're now up and running again.

We hope you enjoy using the new site!

Duncan

Posted by Duncan McMillan on Jun 30, 2014 1:20 PM BST

As you may be aware, our theme for this year is Chemistry and Art with the aim to draw upon the links of the two in demonstrating they are not as far apart as you first think. We’ll be launching our newest website later this month showcasing chemistry and art throughout the ages.

 

As part of the Chemistry and Art project we are hosting and curating an exhibition this summer in London that aims to display different people interpretations of chemistry and art. The exhibition is a free event for the public that will be held in Burlington House, Piccadilly which is the Royal Society of Chemistry's London home and will run from 14th to 25th July from 10 am to 4 pm.

 

We are very excited by the pieces of work that we will be featuring, including work from Insight Radical, Chemart from ChemLabS Bristol Outreach, entries from The Bill Bryson Prize 2014 and images that have featured as part of our 'Through the Lens' feature in our monthly Chemistry World.

 

Insight Radical is an outreach project from Melbourne, Australia which is an "initiative which aims to create dialogue in the broader community about free radicals and their impact" which they achieve by hosting artists within their research laboratories. In this way the artists have been able to learn from the scientists and develop work based on this knowledge and vice versa the scientists have been able to learn about  artwork from the artists. The image below shows a preview of some of the work that we will be showing from Insight Radical at our exhibition.

 

 

The Pill Portraits by Anna Madeleine

 

 

This year’s theme for the Bill Bryson prize was linked with the chemistry and art theme asking the students 'Where is the science in art? Where is the art in science?', to which we had over 500 entries. We are very pleased to be able to show some of the entries from this year’s competition.

 

We will also be presenting some of Bristol ChemLabS Chemart which is "an activity using chemistry research images as stimuli for children's poetry or prose" organised by the science outreach department at Bristol University, ChemLabS. We will be displaying both some of the images and some of the creative writing that primary school students have produced from it.

 

Remember, entry to this  event is free, so why not come along and see the beauty in chemistry and the science in art!

Warning: this exhibition could change your perception of chemistry forever.

Posted by Geri Kitley on Jun 12, 2014 3:32 PM BST
If you have been reading Education in Chemistry recently you may be aware that we have been developing a series of new courses for teachers. The Developing expertise in teaching chemistry courses have online and face-to-face components designed to complement each other.
 
Today we are launching Quantitative chemistry, the first online course in our new series, which covers topics such as conservation of mass, chemical equations, understanding the mole and titrations. This  course can be accessed free of charge, for a limited time, all you need to do is create a RSC ID when prompted. We asked some teachers to take a sneak peek of the course and we are very pleased with the feedback, Dr. Debbie Moore from Weatherhead High School described it as; "An invaluable teacher and teaching resource; easy-to-use, informative and inspiring".
 
 
Screenshot from the new Quantitative chemistry online CPD for teachers course
 
The Developing expertise in teaching chemistry series will be composed of 14 courses, each one designed to consider how students’ ideas about a particular area of chemistry develop and in doing so identify and address specific student misconceptions.
We will follow the launch of Quantitative chemistry with four more online courses throughout 2014. The face-to-face versions of the courses are also undergoing a phased launch throughout 2014 and 2015.
 
We have focused on developing online courses, as well as face-to-face, as we know that it is not always easy to find time to attend courses in person. While an online course cannot replace face-to-face training there are a number of advantages. These include being able to dip in and out of content at your own pace and the flexibility to try out strategies and activities in your own classroom while working through the course. Our online courses are globally relevant and accessible to all.
 
Visit the new homepage for the Developing expertise in chemistry series or go directly to the Quantitative chemistry page to get started today. As always we love to hear from you so if you have any feedback please get in touch at learn-chemistry@rsc.org.
 

Posted by Stephanie Musson on Jun 2, 2014 10:41 AM BST