Find Your Fit Activity

A response to the Find Your Fit Activity
created by Diana Spear (@Diana S)

Number of views: 204

For this activity, I thought about a topic that (some) students find difficult and looked for different types of resources that could help understanding. I chose balancing chemical equations because students who struggle with this often struggle with other of calculations later, so I thought some different approaches to explaining the concept would be helpful. Looking at the links for referatories and repositories offered and searched for explanations and activities for balancing chemical equations.

The results of my search were as follows:

My favorite is this interactive game which helps students understand how to balance chemical equations and I accessed it from (University of Colorado at Boulder simulations) https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/balancing-chemical-equations/latest/balancing-chemical-equations_en.html  This is definitely a site I’ll come back to find interactive activities.

Students have told me that in addition to my screen casts, they like watching additional videos on the various topics we cover, so I always include extra links in Blackboard to videos like Khan Academy etc. I started looking for a video from Ted Ed, but preferred this step-by-step explanation of balancing chemical equations: GCSE Chemistry – Balancing Chemical Equations #5 https://youtu.be/qquOFYOpdl0

One of the required course materials is an excellent textbook which includes explanations, examples, connections to life experiences and practice questions with answers. However, I know that most students never actually read the chapters, so in Libre Texts I found a section from an online text which explains about chemical equations and how to balance them. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-introductory-chemistry/chapter/the-chemical-equation/

I was thrilled to find this site through Merlot which has customizable worksheets with answers. Similar to above, some students prefer worksheets to working on the practice questions in the text. Over the years, I have made some worksheets, but this is brilliant and I will definitely be back to this site https://stemsheets.com/science/pdf/balancing-equations-worksheet/c3JjL2JhbGFuY2luZy1lcXVhdGlvbnMtd29ya3NoZWV0K2tzLzQwMTQraGQvMitvMS8yMCtvMi8zK3ByLzI-3D