One of the subjects that can perplex high school chemistry students is periodic trends. This is the part of the course where you learn how to read the Periodic Table of the Elements. You know, the map that tells us about all the kinds of atoms in the universe. Now, you might say “I don’t like to read maps and, besides, who needs to do it when we’ve got smartphones?” But I’m here to tell you that learning this skill…
As high school students move into their physics courses, especially in AP Physics 1, they’re going to encounter problems involving the study of kinematics, or one-dimensional motion. One of the typical kinds of problems that an instructor may ask students to solve involves acceleration and the application of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Here’s an example. A 43.0 kg parachutist is moving straight downward with a speed of 4.00 meters per second. If the parachutist comes to rest after constantly accelerating…
For many chemistry students, solving stoichiometry problems is a headache. But it does not have to be that way. In this post, I’m going to show you a simple way to make your stoichiometry story a sunny one. What we are usually doing with these types of problems is converting some quantity of a substance, usually expressed in grams, to a different unit called a mole. Then we often go from the number of moles of that first substance to…