General Chemistry for Engineers in the 21st Century: A Materials Science Approach
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General Chemistry for Engineers in the 21st Century: A Materials Science Approach Scott A. Sinex1, Joshua B. Halpern2, and Scott D. Johnson1 1 Physical Sciences & Engineering, Prince George’s Community College, Largo, MD 20774 2 Chemistry, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059 ABSTRACT In the case of General Chemistry, many engineering students only take a one semester class with important topics such as kinetics and equilibrium being given limited coverage. Considerable time is spent covering materials already covered in other courses such as General Physics and Introduction to Engineering. Moreover, most GChem courses are oriented toward health science majors and lack a materials focus relevant to engineering. Taking an atoms first approach, we developed and now run a one-semester course in general chemistry for engineers emphasizing relevant materials topics. Laboratory exercises integrate practical examples of materials science enriching the course for engineering students. First-semester calculus and a calculus-based introduction to engineering course are prerequisites, which enables teaching almost all the topics from a traditional two semester GChem course in this new course with advance topics as well. To support this course, an open access textbook in LibreText, formerly ChemWiki was developed entitled General Chemistry for Engineering. Many of the topics were supported using Chemical Excelets and Materials Science Excelets, which are interactive Excel/Calc spreadsheets. The laboratory includes data analysis and interpretation, calibration, error analysis, reactions, kinetics, electrochemistry, and spectrophotometry. To acquaint the students with online collaboration typical of today’s technical workplace Google Drive was used for data analysis and report preparation in the laboratory. INTRODUCTION A read through Miodownik’s Stuff Matters [1] would convince everyone that materials science is crucial to almost everything in engineering, both large and small. If one peruses textbooks or even the syllabii of courses on the Internet labeled “General Chemistry for Engineers,” many will be nothing more than typical general chemistry with very little orientation towards engineering. Our approach was to design the course around modern materials science with an atoms-first approach that would allow us to get most of first-year general chemistry into a one-semester course for engineers with the addition of topics useful for engineering majors. The course is off and running on the first day since the course has much higher course prerequisites (see Table I) compared to typical first-year chemistry. This allows us to immediately dive into subjects such as atomic structure, a topic perhaps a bit too abstract for our regular students to start with. The textbook in LibreTexts [2] (open source) is designed to group topics to facilitate easy flow between atomic and molecular structure, reactions, states of matter, kinetics, and then into chemical equilibrium and thermodynamics. Data-driven classroom activities and project
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