Using AACT Resources to Plan Your Post-Exam Activities

With just over three weeks to go before the AP exam, I’m sure you’re ready to start exam review activities with your students. But have you thought ahead to what you’ll be doing after May 2nd? Many teachers use that time to complete lab work they didn’t get to during the school year. Others cover topics that are no longer included in the curriculum framework. And some decide to lighten things up with a long term project. Here are some post exam resources you might find useful:

• Organic chemistry project
  This project allows students to investigate stereochemistry and the role it plays in well-known pharmaceutical compounds. Before introducing the project, show your students the Linking Chemistry and Drug Action webinar to learn how important the concepts of equilibrium, first-order kinetics, hydrogen bonding, and acidity are related to drug action.
• Acid Base Creative Letter project
  Acknowledge students’ multiple intelligences and promote higher-order thinking skills with this project. Students write a letter from the perspective of a historical figure or scientist studying acid/base chemistry. Students will learn the importance and relevance of acid/base chemistry to our lives, while exploring how definitions of acids and bases changed throughout history. Introduce the topic with the “Founders of Chemistry: The Acid and Base Guys video” which follows the evolution of the definition of acids and bases from Lavoisier, to Arrhenius, Brønsted-Lowry, and Lewis.
• Town Meeting activity
  Students will independently learn about acid rain, gas scrubbers, half-life, chain reactions, and other topics around electricity production. They will debate as members of a factious community faced with the problem of coal power vs. nuclear power. There are several ChemMatters articles on the topic of Nuclear Chemistry and Sustainability that your students can use to support their positions.
• The Culminating Unknown lab
  Students identify an unknown from a list of 12 possible compounds by designing a procedure and using evidence to prove their claim. They must draw from knowledge gained throughout the year to properly develop a procedure to identify the unknown.
• 21st Century Elements project
  Students will learn the importance of the elements in our lives by researching one chosen element. They create a webpage, a digital comic strip, or a video to explain the important properties of the element as well as its importance to our lives. The Sam Kean Disappearing Spoon Video Series tells the history of 11 different elements and is a perfect introduction to this topic.
• Stop-Motion Video activity
  Students will bring a chemistry concept to life by making a stop-motion animation. Read an article about this type of activity in the Marsh 2015 issue of Chemistry Solutions. Students can also demonstrate mastery of a concept with a Video Project activity, which requires them to explain a multistep problem in a video.