Using New AACT Resources to Help Teach Phase Changes and Heat Transfer

As chemistry teachers around the country plan activities for their students, AACT will be highlighting resources from our high school resource library that can be used to reinforce topics in different units throughout the school year. Our last post highlighted resources to support a Gas Laws unit. We will now focus on activities for a Phase Changes and Heat Transfer unit.

Since our original posts in February 2018 and January 2019, we have added a new resource that you might consider trying with your students. Additionally, we have updated our unit plan using many of our resources to help you teach a unit on Phase Changes and Heat Transfer. Students use a team-based approach to solve the problem of upscaling a chemical process from lab scale to production scale for a hypothetical reaction with the Heat Flow Process Engineering Optimization activity. The project involves the concepts of heat and calorimetry, along with conversion factors. Students use a team-oriented problem-solving approach with an emphasis on data driven decision-making.

We hope that the activities in this unit plan will help you to reinforce several of the topics covered in a unit about phase changes and heat transfer. 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.