SMILE wants chemistry to be easier for informal educators, and is creating a special collection of hands-on chemistry activities to that end. The new collection will launch just in time for the 2011 International Year of Chemistry.
Joel Rosenberg (pictured), former high school chemistry teacher and current technical project manager for SMILE, is leading the charge. In August he attended the Biennial Conference on Chemistry Education in Denton, Texas, to talk about SMILE’s plans. "We're making some additions to howtosmile.org specifically for chemistry educators that I wanted the community to know about," he said.
With funding from the Dreyfus Foundation, SMILE is cataloging chemistry activities from institutions that include OMSI in Portland, Oregon, Sciencenter in Ithaca, New York, and the American Chemical Society in Washington, DC. And SMILE is enriching these activities with information to help informal educators facilitate hands-on chemistry that is both fun and safe.
"There are several obstacles to doing chemistry," Joel explained. "One is that the chemicals themselves can be intimidating, from buying and storing them, to disposing of them once they're used. Another is the specialized equipment and glassware.”
While all SMILE activities have value-added metadata that allows educators to search by everything from prep time to materials required, the chemistry collection will also have information about the chemicals themselves. This data will appear in the materials list, and will include hazards and other relevant information, links to Material Safety Data Sheets, and places to purchase small quantities of the chemical -- including whether it's available in a local store.
Joel has also been researching storage and disposal schemes that should make chemicals less intimidating to work with. "Surprisingly,” he notes, “the storage and disposal of chemicals is an unsolved problem in all of chemistry education, not just informal chemistry education." SMILE is working with U.C. Berkeley College of Chemistry, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Chemical Society to develop useful storage and disposal schemes that are beneficial to all chemical educators.
"We hope these additions to the chemistry activities in howtosmile.org will make chemicals less intimidating to informal science educators," Joel says, "and that it will help kick-start the informal chemistry educator community on SMILE."