Congratulations!  You’ve all made it to the end of the first week.  This is the first of a series of postings that will show up here on the Chemistry Information Site at the end of each week.  Here we’ll summarize what we did over the course of the week and I’ll give you some suggestions as to what you should be doing to prepare for the next week.

CHM 101

Like all the CHM classes, we spent a good portion of our first class period going over the various administrative things we needed to talk about to get the course started.  Then, we discussed the basic definition on chemistry and how to use the scientific method.  Since chemistry is a measurement-based science, we discussed units (mostly metric) and how to change back and forth between different units.  We also performed a classroom experiment on precision, and we’ll discuss the results of that experiment first thing on Monday.

Over the weekend, work on your first assignment (it’s due Monday morning) on unit conversions.  By this point, you should have read through chapters 1 and 2 in the textbook and started on the suggested problems from the study guides for these chapters.  If you’ve not done so yet, print out the first two study guides and this week’s notes and put them all in a binder for you to study with.

CHM 110 (01 and 02 – Monday/Wednesday sections)

Like all the CHM classes, we spent a good portion of our first class period going over the various administrative things we needed to talk about to get the course started.  Then, we discussed measurements and reviewed the metric system, along with several derived metric units that are useful for chemistry.  We discussed dimensional analysis – a method of problem-solving that’s particularly good for unit conversions.

Over the weekend, you should work on some of the practice sets and suggested problems from chapter 1.  By this point, you should have read through chapter 1 and be starting on chapter 2 in the textbook.  If you don’t have your book yet, use the supplemental notes (the first two headings cover the first two chapters in the book) to stay caught up with the material.  If you’ve not done so yet, print out the first two study guides and this week’s notes and put them all in a binder for you to study with.

CHM 110 (03 – Tuesday/Thursday sections)

Like all the CHM classes, we spent a good portion of our first class period going over the various administrative things we needed to talk about to get the course started.  Then, we discussed measurements and reviewed the metric system, along with several derived metric units that are useful for chemistry.  We discussed dimensional analysis – a method of problem-solving that’s particularly good for unit conversions.

Over the weekend, you should work on some of the practice sets and suggested problems from chapter 1.  By this point, you should have read through chapter 1 and be starting on chapter 2 in the textbook.  If you don’t have your book yet, use the supplemental notes (the first two headings cover the first two chapters in the book) to stay caught up with the material.  If you’ve not done so yet, print out the first two study guides and this week’s notes and put them all in a binder for you to study with.  And yes, for this week all the CHM 110 sections are at the same place.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them as comments on this post.