(379j) Integrating a Vitamin C Iodine Clock Experiment into Undergraduate Kinetics

One of the challenges when teaching core chemical engineering courses is having a hands-on component as part of the course to strengthen student understanding of key concepts. An added benefit of having integrated lab experiments is that students can develop their own experimental plan to varying levels.

Here an iodine clock experiment was integrated into the junior undergraduate kinetics course to help students with determining rates, rate orders and activation energy. Students were given several pre-lab readings and a pre-lab homework assignment to motivate students to review the readings and to determine how to analyze potential data from the experiment. Students had a reference YouTube video (made by one of the professors) as a visual reference to aid in student understanding prior to the experiment. Students were given some instructions and suggested experiments to test and they completed a 3-hour experiment. Students obtained rates, rate orders and activation energy for their system and submitted a 3-page maximum report summarizing their findings. This experiment provided students with a hands-on experience, basic experimental design skills and technical writing practice.