Periodic Universe: A Teaching Model for Understanding the Periodic Table of the Elements

Atomic orbitals represent an essential construct used to develop chemical bonding models, upon which other more advanced chemistry topics are built. In this article, we share a series of active-learning activities and a gamified approach to develop students' representational competence about atomic orbitals and to engage students in learning the properties of atomic orbitals. These properties are essential for understanding an array of fundamental concepts such as penetration and shielding, relationships such as periodic trends, and models used to describe chemical bonding. The activities employ an inquiry-based approach to engage students in exploring the relationship between atomic orbitals' spatial properties and quantum numbers. The activities guide students to collect data to verify periodic trends and construct electronic configurations. The activities utilize Orbital Explorer Web site for visualization, comparison, and analysis of atomic orbitals. The Orbital Explorer Web site is described in a related Technology Report. The activities and the game are suitable to be conducted in both in-person and remote-teaching settings.

“…This work is compared with other existing activities − targeting similar concepts (Table ). All activities under comparison report positive results despite various analytical methods.…”

Section: Results and Improvementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inquiry-Based Activities and Games That Engage Students in Learning Atomic Orbitals

Muñiz

Chun

et al. 2022

“…The introduction of general information and chemometric concepts was carried out using Besalú’s paper . There are several papers in this Journal dealing with the periodic table and grouping elements together by similarities in their chemical properties. − Using atomic properties to teach PCA has a high pedagogical value, since students are familiar with the periodic table and, with the analysis, are able to observe that chemical elements are grouped together according to similarities in their properties.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching Principal Component Analysis Using a Free and Open Source Software Program and Exercises Applying PCA to Real-World Examples

Sidou

Borges

2020

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most important and powerful methods in chemometrics as well as in a wealth of other areas. Running a PCA results in two main elements, the score plot and the loading plot; the score plot provides the location of the samples, and the loading plot indicates correlations among variables, the trends in the grouping of samples, and the most important variables. In the past 10 years teaching chemometrics, we have struggled with not having free software with an easy to use graphical user interface for data handling and calculations. In this paper, we provide a series of examples that students used to carry PCA in R-Project, a free and open source software program. In the first example, students used PCA to find correlations among chemical properties of chemical elements and relate these properties with the periodic distribution of the elements. In the second example, meat samples were grouped using 14 variables, and students could observe how outlier samples might influence the PCA model; in this case, they were also taught how to use the t test to choose the variables that were significant to the PCA model. In the third example, healthy patients were differentiated from diabetic patients using 163 lipid concentrations. In the fourth example, Atlantic salmon samples were differentiated from catfish samples. In the fifth and sixth examples, students were able to observe how data treatment affects the classification of natural products and edible oils, respectively.

“…Students’ understanding of the scientific content and their process skills would also be achieved in the inquiry process . Because of these advantages, there has been an increasing interest in inquiry-based learning − which is regarded as one of the central goals of science education reforms …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges Encountered by Student Teachers in an Inquiry-Based Laboratory Process

Wang

Wei

2022

Inquiry is one integral part of science learning. Understanding the underlining meaning and the complete procedures of inquiry-based laboratories would be beneficial to student teachers' future work. Therefore, it is necessary for student teachers to perform inquiry-based laboratories and know how to demonstrate them to school students. However, the differences between cookbook-style laboratories and inquiry-based ones may present obstacles for student teachers if most of them were more familiar with the traditional type. This study examined the potential difficulties that student teachers might encounter when conducting inquiry-based chemistry laboratories. Information was gathered through a self-designed questionnaire, interviews, and student teachers' self-reports. Data from the questionnaire were analyzed to gain a preliminary understanding of what challenges the student teachers had met during the inquiry-based laboratory, from their viewpoints. Results from interviews were combined with those from self-reports to investigate how the challenges had impacted the student teachers' perceptions of the difficulty of the inquiry-based laboratory. This study found some challenges encountered by the student teachers in inquiry-based laboratories that were considered difficult, such as presenting research questions. But not all challenges had influences on student teachers' perceptions of the difficulty level of inquiry-based laboratories. A cyclical progression of students' mental states in inquiry-based laboratories is presented to support research about inquiry-based learning.