Popular Resources For Teaching Kinetics
By AACT on April 25, 2025
As members of AACT, you have access to a huge classroom resource library. Finding the right labs and learning opportunities for your classroom can be overwhelming. This year, AACT will feature popular resources for units you may teach. Use these news posts as a guide to try something new!
The Reaction Mechanisms activity is one of our most popular activities for introducing collision theory and rate of reaction. The game Hungry Hungry Hippos is used to model collision theory and a Minute To Win It relay race is used to explain what rate-determining steps are. The activity ends with the Elephant Toothpaste demo, which does a great job at explaining how a catalyst speeds up the rate of reaction as students observe that hydrogen peroxide decomposes without even showing any signs of a chemical reaction until the catalyst is added.
The highly favorited Investigating Reaction Rates simulation allows students to investigate what happens when particles collide as a reaction happens and then change up common variables that impact the rate of reaction. Being able to see the changes as the particles interact can increase comprehension.
A fun activity to end the unit is our Launching Rockets activity, which is the most popular by far! Each student uses stoichiometry to create the right amount of O2 to power their rocket and then explains why the catalyst is needed in that reaction. This activity features content from multiple units in Chemistry as it requires an understanding of reactants, stoichiometry, thermochemistry, and more!
We hope that the activities in this unit plan will help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit on kinetics. Most of these lessons were made possible by great teachers who shared their own resources. We need your help to keep the collection growing. Do you have a great demonstration, activity, or lesson related to this topic that you would like to share with the community? Please send it along for consideration.