The Lost Cross and Mandatory Lab 6.1

March 25, 2016

Mandatory Lab 6.1 refers to ‘Investigation of rates of reaction experimentally and evaluation of the results’. Here, in the UK, I have been introduced to a new way of carrying out the ‘lost cross’ experiment with respect to changing the temperature. The experiment is...

Walther Hermann Nernst and EE’s

February 26, 2016

You may have heard of the Nernst equation (named after guess who?!) and we will look at it in a moment but I always think it is good to put things into context. Nernst lived from 1864 – 1941 and was a German Chemist. He is famous for proposing the third law of...

Popeye and the Nature of Science

February 24, 2016

We all love the cartoon character Popeye (and if memory serves me correctly, it was also a film string the late Robin Williams). If you are unfamiliar with the character, the story-line will be familiar to you as it is the sort of story-line that most cartoons use. It...

Are you up to date?

January 29, 2016

Breaking news – four new elements have been added to the periodic table. I’m sure chemists are paid to do this by the companies who make period tables to get us to buy new ones. OK, that’s a bad joke. Bad jokes aside, here are some more information about these new...

More FAQs on the ‘New’ Course (examinations May 2016)

January 22, 2016

I’d like to start by wishing a Happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a good New Year wherever in the word you were. From our IB Chemistry perspective, 2016 is a big year for us as in May, the first cohort of students will sit exams in the new IB Chemistry course....

Microscale Chemistry

December 18, 2015

The Royal Society of Chemistry has produced a booklet entitled ‘Microscale Chemistry’ (http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/ebook/9781870343497#!divbookcontent). Microscale chemistry has been around for 20 or so years but many teachers are not aware of it or its teaching...