Last year I went to judge the NSEC chemistry prize at the Big Bang Fair and had the honour of meeting some staggeringly dedicated young men and women. I was really excited after last year’s overall Young Scientist of the Year turned out to be a chemist. The chemistry prize then had to be supported by...
Usually the best way to learn something is just to get stuck in and do it. Have a play, make mistakes, try new things. It’s with this in mind that I’ve always wanted to explore ways of getting school students doing real, novel, useful scientific research. Ultimately this led to the idea that became Decipher...
The last time I taught equilibrium to my Year 13s, I had a number of bright, inquisitive students who got frustrated with the idea that for an equilibrium between A + B (see below) increasing the concentration of A would shift the position of equilibrium to the right but Kc would be unaffected. I tried showing...
Background This year we’ve ended up teaching the the mole just after the acids and bases work (we’ve tagged together the C2 and C3 stuff from the AQA GCSE chemistry course). I started off covering the basics and before we got too far into producing salts and doing titrations I thought it was worthwhile skipping...
I’ll be up at the ASE Annual Conference for a number of reasons – I’ll be showing a couple of my Exhibition Chemistry demos as part of the RSC Teacher Fellow tag team demo show and I’ll also be supporting the launch of the Mole but my primary reason for going is to get as many...
When the directing team “Daniels” came up with the concept for what is easily my favourite video of 2011, I suspect that teaching chemistry wasn’t their first priority. I should know, I even watched the “making of” just to check .. and to geek out at their impressive rig which gave them the ability to shoot...
Here’s a short clip from Surrey Science Circus where I was kindly invited to deliver the classic Gases in the Air demo lecture last week. See if you can spot me! Thanks to Anna for the invite!
What is this? This is an Open Educational Resource designed to summarise key concepts in entropy and free energy that are required for entry to an undergraduate course. The resource is designed for first year undergraduates or able A-level students in mind and it revisits ideas from A-level. It also begins to show how they...
What is this? This is an Open Educational Resource designed to summarise key concepts in acid-base chemistry that are required for entry to an undergraduate course. The resource is designed for first year undergraduates or able A-level students in mind and it revisits ideas from A-level. It also begins to show how they are applied...
What is this? This is an Open Educational Resource designed to summarise key concepts in equilibrium that are required for entry to an undergraduate course. The resource is designed for first year undergraduates or able A-level students in mind and it revisits ideas from A-level. It also begins to show how they are applied early...
Gases in the Air This is the classic School Teacher Fellow demo lecture involving a lot of liquid nitrogen and dry ice! It focuses on changes of state, particles and physical vs. chemical changes. It can be delivered to a wide audience but is regularly delivered to primary audiences by myself and the outreach team...
Cracking Cold Light is a 50 minute workshop aimed at introducing the basics of rates of reaction and the scientific method through a chemiluminescence context. The workshop is delivered by a team of students from the University of Bath (usually led by me) and can be aimed at a KS2 or KS3 audience. Group sizes can be...
![national-science-and-engineering-competition[1]](http://declanfleming.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/national-science-and-engineering-competition1-50x50.jpg "national-science-and-engineering-competition[1]")
