Fuming Chemicals Inc.—An Entrepreneurial Activity in Organic Chemistry

Abstract

Successful mastery of multistep synthesis is an essential learning objective in the completion of the organic chemistry sequence. This entrepreneurial class project was designed to incentivize students to master multistep synthesis through role-playing as an entrepreneur. In short, students play the role of a group member in a startup whereby they must work with a group in their assigned role to create a multistep synthetic route. This startup presents their synthetic route history, synthesis, and financial cost of a target molecule to the investor (faculty). The results of this class project demonstrated improvement in the overall retention of multistep synthesis pathways as monitored by a paper summative assessment question.

“Design a Sensor”: Implementation of Entrepreneurial-Minded Learning in Undergraduate General Chemistry

“…Although this was only a two-year program, its inception marks the beginning of increasing prioritization of entrepreneurship in undergraduate chemistry education. Entrepreneurial learning has since been implemented in several chemistry contexts including general chemistry, 34 organic chemistry, 35 and pharmaceutical chemistry. 36 Importantly, a large majority of the existing chemistry-oriented EML has occurred in the context of smaller, specialized courses with predominantly third-and fourth-year students.…”