Event Details

Join Luke Delmas (Senior Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London) and Benjamin Woolley (Teaching Lecturer at Lancaster University) for a talk on the first year lab programme. Also available on Teams.

Transitioning to university-level practical courses can be difficult for first-year chemistry students, who arrive with varying levels of lab experience. Introductory lab courses often focus on techniques and chemical knowledge, but rarely emphasize the transferable skills essential for scientific growth. To address this, we created Chemical Kitchen, exploring parallels between the work of professional chefs and chemists. By simulating laboratory scenarios through the metaphor of cooking, this approach can reduce cognitive load and provide a safe setting to practice planning, organization, close observation, record keeping, communication, teamwork, and safe working. Students practice some fundamental skills of practical chemistry without needing an in depth knowledge of the field.

The first half of the talk will explore how this approach helps students build confidence and learn to think and work like scientists before entering a chemistry lab. We examined changes in students’ self-efficacy during their first two laboratory sessions. Quantitative data showed that those with low self-efficacy improved significantly, while those starting with (perhaps overly) high self-efficacy adjusted their expectations of university-level learning. We interpret this as the course helping to “level the playing field” among new students in terms of their confidence as they prepared for their first synthetic experiment – a significant step for any new starter.

Some years ago, students would then go on to prepare a sample of PbI₂ – the classic ‘golden rain’ demonstration. The chemistry is robust and the sparkling suspension of crystals excited the students and got them talking. Then, university science teaching was turned upside down by the Covid-19 pandemic. Adapting chemical kitchen to remote work was easy – but unable to execute the golden rain experiment in the ‘home laboratory’ meant we needed a new plan for an introductory synthetic experiment. The second half of this talk will explore the development of an alternative acid-base experiment which was deployed firstly through mail-out lab-in-a-box kits and how it was later brought back on to campus for in-person delivery. The evolution of the practical, design of the associated assessments, and it’s ability to pivot on and off campus will be presented.

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References:

J. Chem. Educ. 2024, DOI:10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00950

J. Chem. Educ. 2021, 98, 3, 710–713