BYOL: Bring Your Own Lime Hands-On Laboratory Experience

Abstract

BYOL (Bring Your Own Lime), a novel laboratory experiment, is introduced in this paper. Students are encouraged to bring affordable household and grocery store chemicals into the classroom. The Bring Your Own Chemical (BYOC) concept demonstrates to students that food and household products are chemicals too. Citruses are often used to highlight the link between everyday life and chemistry. Due to the large amount of citric acid that limes contain, they can be squeezed and their juice used for experimentation. The aim of the experiment is to determine the first stepwise dissociation constant of citric acid in grocery store limes. The BYOL: Bring Your Own Lime laboratory experiment achieves several goals: it makes chemistry relatable, boosts both content knowledge (preparative chemistry, spectrophotometry and conductivity measurements) and soft skills, is not time-consuming (requires 75 min if the provided calibration curve is used), and is an enjoyable experience.

Awaking Interest in Science Learning: Hands-On Photosynthesis Demonstrations Using Elodea canadensis and Spinacia oleracea

“…Many scholars have agreed on the importance of students having an active encounter with the subject being studied. ,, This activity aims to increase the interest of students in science and ease the learning process of photosynthesis through an accessible, visually explicit, and cost-effective workshop. In this activity, students can perform the experiments by themselves and explore basic concepts of photosynthesis while increasing their curiosity through an inexpensive activity.…”

“…Also, finding exciting ways to teach awakens the interest in science . Other activities like Bring Your Own Lime look for hands-on ways to highlight the link between everyday life and chemistry to make science more relatable using a lime and a spectrophotometer …”

“…12 Other activities like Bring Your Own Lime look for hands-on ways to highlight the link between everyday life and chemistry to make science more relatable using a lime and a spectrophotometer. 13 Bearing this in mind, we looked for different experiments to explain the process of photosynthesis to high school students from the ages 12 to 17. We came across a commercially available Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration Kit that allows them to explore both processes through colorimetric techniques.…”

An Integrated Database of Common Chemicals and Chemistry Demonstrations and Student Experiments Used in Hungary

“…This challenge prompted many educators to approach this problem from a pragmatic point of view by using chemicals, equipment, and devices that are available or can be simply transformed from everyday, frequently household materials and tools. The large number of publications on this topic include inter alia analytical, − electrochemical, − synthetic, − and isolation experiments.…”