2014 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education

The purpose of this workshop is to provide teachers of first year college chemistry and advanced high school chemistry with some inquiry-based activities designed to help students explore the nature of light, how light interacts with matter, and how this interaction helps us to understand the structure of atoms and molecules. We will begin with activities that explore the wave nature of light, providing evidence that light is a wave, that blue light has higher frequency than red light, and that the energy of light is proportional to frequency. We will then examine the particle nature of light. Finally, we extend the wave-particle duality of light to electrons, and consider how electron waves confined in atoms lead to quantization of electron energies, atomic orbitals and atomic spectra. The workshop will model inquiry-based learning by having participants complete the activities and then discuss them.