September 2018

# New, freely available, interactive high school chemistry lessons

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Laura Ingram and Carey Bissonnette, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario

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The Department of Chemistry at the University of Waterloo proudly announces the launch of our new Open-Science website: open.science.uwaterloo.ca. It provides freely available, interactive online lessons on general topics in high school chemistry curricula.

A typical lesson is based on clearly articulated learning objectives and combines text, images, animations and narrated videos. The key feature of these online lessons is the variety of dynamically generated interactive questions with instant feedback. The lessons can introduce or review concepts for student-guided learning.

With the input of chemistry teachers, we will continue to add lessons to build a library of topics most needed by teachers and their students.

The initial set of lessons include:

- The Mole Concept,
- Solving Stoichiometry Problems,
- The pH Scale,
- Significant Figures and
- Buffer solutions.

The integration of technology into the classroom is often welcomed by students; however, developing reliable and relevant online content can be a challenge. As part of this initiative teachers are invited to participate in a professional development program designed to provide the instruction, resources and support required to participate and design additional lessons. These lessons will be added to the Open Science website.

We invite all chemistry teachers and students to explore our first set of lessons, and we welcome all comments and feedback. We want to hear from you: What do you like? What don’t you like? How will you integrate the resources into your class? How can we improve the resources? What lessons would you suggest we create?

Call to action

We need your help creating additional interactive online chemistry resources useful to the high school chemistry classroom. Please contact us at open.science@uwaterloo.ca.

Laura Ingram and Carey Bissonnette presenting Open.Science.uwaterloo.ca - a teacher dressed up in a large green chlorine atom

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