Popular Resources for Teaching Gas Laws

This article highlights some of the most popular resources for a Gas Laws unit. For more ideas, visit the gas laws unit plan.

The top resource in our gas laws collection is the Three Station Gas Lab. In this activity, students will investigate relationships of variables involved with gases using readily available household materials. They will model the particles in the gases based on their observations and explain what is happening.

The Gas Laws simulation pairs well with the Three Station Gas Lab for students to check the accuracy of their models. The simulation highlights Boyle’s Law, Charles’ Law and Gay-Lussac’s Law through adjusting the amount of pressure, volume, or temperature in each situation. In the accompanying activity, students analyze the gas samples at the particle level and interpret trends in their data.

Once students have a solid understanding of the relationship between temperature, pressure, and volume in a gas, use the Ideal Gas Law lab to introduce how gases are modeled mathematically and to talk about the difference between real and ideal gases. 

We hope that these activities can help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit on gas laws. Most of these lessons were made possible by great teachers who shared their own resources. We need your help to keep the collection growing. Do you have a great demonstration, activity, or lesson related to this topic that you would like to share with the community? Please send it along for consideration.