CHED 93 |
| Microscopic visual presentation can help chemistry students make the hard-to-envisage connection between equations and observed phenomena. As a way of providing new and better tools to teach “old” concepts, we demonstrate the integration into the chemistry curriculum, the “Micromanipulation Technique combined with Digital Video Microscopy”. The unique features of this system will give students a rarely-seen real-time view of the dynamics of chemical reactions as they evolve at the microscopic scale. Using this experimental system, individual droplets of picoliter size volume (10 to 100 microns diameter) can be easily created, observed, and manipulated in a well-defined and -controlled liquid environment. A pair of droplets can be manipulated simultaneously and brought together into contact. Upon their fusion, two different chemical reagents encapsulated in the droplets mix and subsequent chemical reactions occur. Using this system, visual experiments illustrating basic concepts of chemistry, such as dissolution, crystallization, and precipitation can be clearly demonstrated in a time scale of seconds to minutes. An entire reaction event will be visualized in real-time and easily digitized into movie form as a classroom-teaching tool. This dynamic visual experience will not only stimulate students' interest and active engagement in their learning of chemistry, but will also constitute an efficient way to demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of the sciences: biology, physics, materials science, nanotechnology, and chemistry. In addition, this approach will engage students to phenomena occurring at the micro/nanoscale early in their undergraduate careers, developing their experience in the small-scale sciences of the future (nanoscience and nanotechnology). |
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General Posters
7:30 PM-9:30 PM, Sunday, 10 September 2006 Moscone Center -- Hall D, Poster
Division of Chemical Education |