PRE IB: The Basics – Bonds

June 10, 2017

This blog was written by Dave Allen, an experienced IB Chemistry teacher. To read more Chemistry blogs for students and teachers, click here. Knowing your bonds (and structures). This blog post will (hopefully) refresh your memory on bonds and structures that you will...

PRE IB: The Basics – Moles

This blog was written by Dave Allen, an experienced IB Chemistry teacher. To read more Chemistry blogs for students and teachers, click here. Yes, you have read that correctly – we get moles in Chemistry as well as Biology. However, our mole is not the small furry...

PRE IB: Why Chemistry?

This blog was written by Dave Allen, an experienced IB Chemistry teacher. To read more Chemistry blogs for students and teachers, click here. This is the first blog post of four offering students advice on the IBDP Chemistry course (both SL and HL). The four posts...

Carrying out a good IA project

May 24, 2017

Have you stated your Internal Assessment(IA) yet? If you are a ‘May session’ school, this anytime from May of IB1 until December of IB2 seems a likely time that your school will carry this out with you and ask you to write it up. Which means that you need...

VX – What is it?

March 27, 2017

Over this last month or so, the nerve agent VX has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons but I did think it was worth looking at the chemistry of this molecule in this moths blog post. The obvious question is what is it? VX, or, to use the full IUPAC name is...

Metallic Hydrogen and Scepticism

February 27, 2017

Scientists are supposed to be sceptical of others claims – you will encounter this in NOS (NOS 1.7 ‘Scientists must adopt a sceptical attitude to claims’). Why do I quote this? Well, you may have recently read or seen in the news that a new form (state) of Hydrogen...