Introduction
Dear student and researchers,
We’re glad you’re here. Welcome to CEM 255! This course is an evolving product of design-based educational research. We welcome your feedback on the materials and projects.
The development of this transformed laboratory course has been supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant and the ongoing optimization of the design is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. This adaptation of the original Cooperative Organic Chemistry features Green and Sustainable Chemistry, an urgent need for progress in science.
The basis for this laboratory curriculum is to experience science from the perspective of an organic chemist. If you took CEM 161 or 162 here at MSU, you would find many elements of the curriculum (especially the assignments and rubrics) to be very similar. You and your group members will be tasked with a project that will require you to design and carry out an investigation centered around an organic chemistry reaction that you are familiar with from CEM 251 and 252.
Within that investigation, each team member will use organic chemistry techniques and instrumentation to contribute to the overall argumentation needed to answer the project’s scenario. These intellectual practices of designing and carrying out investigations, collecting and analyzing data, and engaging in argumentation from evidence are a few of the key Scientific Practices, i.e., the performances through which scientists “do” science. This course will give you opportunities to plan investigations, engage in green decision-making, use scientific models of phenomena, construct explanations, analyze data to generate evidence, and use that evidence in argumentation communicated in classically scientific ways—reports, scientific papers, posters, and oral presentations.
One “novel” portion of this course is the concurrent 50-minute “recitation”, in which you and your team will meet in an online meeting to work through case studies of sustainability issues that require analysis and decision-making from a green and sustainable chemistry lens. As a unique communication opportunity, these case studies will give your team an opportunity to communicate scientific understanding and sustainability solutions in a policy context—through a technical report and constructing a policy paper. In these case studies, you will use your organic chemistry knowledge from lecture and your understanding of safety and green chemistry metrics from laboratory to make sustainable decisions and communicate those to important stakeholders: the public and public servants. The recitation content may subject to changes depends on different semesters.
You will sometimes make mistakes, but you will not be penalized by a “one-shot” opportunity to complete an experiment. Instead, in these activities you will have time and space to rectify any mistakes throughout the multi-week projects and case studies. Not everything you try will work, and while this may be frustrating, keep in mind that temporary frustration is a natural state of problem solving.
