Teaching Strategies

Topic Strategy Title Description
Zinc in Copper Sulphate Demonstration

Put zinc metal in copper sulphate solution and record it with the visualiser. Have it running as you talk about the push and pull of electrons. Then bring it up and say, ‘look what’s happened here, the zinc has rusted’. Students make more of a link when they see things being visualised. The...

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Physical Representations

Use little cartoons or even just physical representations. Have a jar of marbles representing electrons and move them around. Because sometimes having physical things to manipulate helps with understanding of a concept. Even though in reality it’s nothing like it, it’s just a representation.

Everyday Examples - Bike Rust

Use everyday examples. A great question to have at the end of your lecture would be ‘What is reduced when my bike rusts?’ They might understand that their bike rusts, but what is reduced? Oxygen and water are reduced. But we don’t see the reduction, we just see the iron changing. You have done...

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Only a Few Key Principles

There are only about three key principles that they need to know from this topic at first year level. All of it comes back to understanding equilibrium and buffers. Because if they understand buffers (which involves understanding weak acids and weak bases, conjugate acids, conjugate bases,...

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Connect Basics to Buffers

Start with HA and move on to specific chemistry. Reinforce pKa and connect with buffers by asking students to pick conjugate acid/base combinations to make up buffers with different pH. Use the concept that adding strong acid to a buffer converts it to a weak acid, increasing the...

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