About This Lesson
This two-part lesson examines the concepts of “amount of substance” and its unit, “mole”, which are fundamental core concepts in Chemistry. It is designed to develop and optimize learning/teaching strategies to help students understand these two difficult concepts. The key learning objective is to help students understand that “amount of substance” is used as a bridge to connect the invisible micro world to the observable macro world. The materials for the students’ activities are simple and easily obtained, such as beans, kitchen scales, a stack of paper, a ruler and some chemicals that are common in chemistry labs. Teachers can always make changes and prepare the materials according to what they have in their schools. This lesson is designed for two class sessions and each class session is about 45-50 minutes. Before beginning this lesson, students should have prerequisite knowledge about atoms and atomic structure, including the concepts of isotopes and relative atomic mass. They should also know the composition of matter and the meaning of a chemical equation. In addition, they should know how to express a number in scientific notation.
This two-part lesson, along with two other BLOSSOMS lessons, can be used to present a teaching unit on Amount of Substance and Mole. We suggest that the four lessons be used in the following sequence:
- Amount of Substance and Its Unit - Mole: Part 1;
- How Big Is a Mole: Do We Really Understand Avogadro’s Number?;
- Amount of Substance and Its Unit - Mole: Part 2;
- Stoichiometry.
For more information: http://blossoms.mit.edu/videos/lessons/amount_substance_and_its_unit_mo…
