Cool Courses

"I sure wish I were back in school!"

That might very well be your response on hearing about some creative science courses that were recently introduced for college and high school students. For instance, Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, Va., just north of Richmond, offers a laboratory course on the chemistry of wine--complete with a trip to wineries in California's Napa Valley. And Fairmont State University, in Fairmont, W. Va., is experimenting with courses that blend the science and folklore related to coal. These innovative courses were among several described last month at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in San Diego in sessions sponsored by the Division of Chemical Education.

Randolph-Macon's wine course is offered in the school's January term, during which students take the same subject each day for the entire month. In the first two weeks, the students taste 50 to 60 wines at the college; they taste a like number while they're in California for the second half of the course.

Although students may be attracted to the class for its obvious benefits, they should not make the mistake of thinking it's an easy A. "They're not in this class to have a party," assistant chemistry professor April D. Hennis Marchetti said. "It's a very difficult class."

The course "integrates science with the regions of wine production," which range from France to California and the American Northwest, Australia and New Zealand, Argentina, Spain, and Portugal, Marchetti said. On the second day, for instance, the class learns about the white wines of France, with instruction covering white wine production, the chemistry of white wine, and how fermentation converts sugar to alcohol. The students are taught what an alcohol is and what the different chain lengths are. They also learn about alcohol's physiological effects, which alcohols are safe to ingest, and which aren't.

The following day, the students move on to the red wines of France. They study production and learn about compounds in red wine such as resveratrol, including its chemical structure and beneficial health effects. Later on, the course covers sparkling wines, a topic that introduces the use of carbon dioxide.

LAB EXERCISES include measurement, solution preparation, introduction to chemical reactions, concentration and pH, and physical properties. Students use methods such as distillation, titration, and paper chromatography to test grape must and wine for soluble solids, acidity, alcohols, and sulfur dioxide.

"A lot of this is brand-new information for students who are nonmajors," Marchetti said. "I think that oftentimes the students don't realize how much chemistry they're actually learning--which is good, because a lot of times nonscience majors are really intimidated by learning chemistry. So if you can sneak it into the class without their realizing it, it's a good thing."

Despite the surreptitious helping of chemistry, the students have really taken to the subject matter. In fact, "last year, we had a couple of students say that it was the best course they had taken at Randolph-Macon," Marchetti said. The course may leave nonscience majors with a more favorable attitude toward chemistry than those who take general chemistry to fulfill the college's science requirement. Students heading into a career in business or law, for instance, don't really perceive the pertinence of general chemistry to their lives, Marchetti said. On the other hand, what these majors learn in the wine course can be applied to knowledgeably ordering wine at a business dinner.

Ironically, the wine course almost did not make it off the drawing board. Serge H. P. Schreiner, a wine connoisseur and chair of the chemistry department, first proposed the subject several years ago. The idea didn't fly at the time because "the college didn't feel that a course that involved drinking alcohol was appropriate," according to Marchetti.

But Marchetti, who joined the faculty in 2001, believed that the subject matter could benefit students. Not only would it serve to educate nonscientists about chemistry, it might also help students to become more responsible in their drinking, she argued. Marchetti and Schreiner proved convincing, and the course was given the go-ahead. It debuted in January 2004.

Feedback from students--who must be at least 21--seems to support Marchetti's hunch about drinking behavior. "Prior to taking this course, the students drink the cheapest things possible," she said. "After they take the course, we feel they drink more in moderation. Students who have an appreciation for the taste of wine aren't going to go out to the grocery store and buy a $2.00 bottle of wine and drink it just to get drunk, because they realize that it doesn't taste very good. We're trying to keep them from binge drinking by educating them about the topic."

The class costs students $1,600 for travel and wine expenses. Next January, Marchetti and Schreiner hope to take the class to Australia and New Zealand, which would boost the tab to about $3,500. Scholarships are available for those with financial need.

As Marchetti and Schreiner discovered, it's not always easy to get an unusual new class under way. Andreas Baur and his colleagues at Fairmont State also encountered their share of setbacks when they set out to develop a new liberal studies course centered on coal.

The coal course has its roots in a workshop hosted by the Science Education for New Civic Engagements & Responsibilities (SENCER) project, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Baur, an assistant chemistry professor, and his colleagues--including a physicist, a biologist, a geologist, a science educator, and an English professor--attended the workshop with the goal of developing a SENCER course. These courses "engage students in science education by looking at the issues that science either solves or causes," according to Baur. The courses "bring civic engagement and society issues into science teaching."

After hearing about the concept of "learning communities" at the workshop, the Fairmont State team decided to adopt this framework for its new course. A learning community draws together students from two different courses in which the subject matter is related. For Fairmont State, Baur and his colleagues devised a new science course and modified a preexisting folklife and folklore course, linking them through coal as the unifying theme. In addition to attending both the science and folklore courses, students who participated in the learning community met for periodic one-hour seminars to cover coal-based subjects that related to both science and folklore.

THE PROFESSORS chose coal as their theme because Fairmont State is located in a coal-mining region of West Virginia, and many students have relatives who have worked in the coal mines. Students learn about every facet of coal--from its formation through extraction, preparation, and transportation to its use in power plants. They explore chemistry topics including bonding, acidity, and combustion.

"We also look at the negative side of coal," including the environmental consequences of acid mine drainage, Baur said. The students learn about the effect of coal on the health of streams by collecting water samples at a stream. They also examine the social issues and politics of coal. "There are jobs related to coal mining," Baur explained, but in some cases, mining is "destroying communities, destroying the environment."

In the folklore course, students study oral and written history and songs relating to coal. They learn about coal towns and the segregation that existed within the towns. They interview people who worked in coal mines.

The science course was first given in the fall term of 2003 and is now being taught for the fourth time. The learning community feature has been dropped for this semester, however. Part of the reason it hasn't caught on with students, Baur suspects, is that Fairmont State is primarily a commuter campus. It serves many nontraditional students, who often represent the first generation in their families to attend college. Because of their off-campus commitments, the students don't have the flexibility to commit to eight hours of class each week.

Although Baur and his colleagues have encountered some setbacks, their science class has successfully opened students' eyes to the science entwined with their everyday lives. That same goal is driving the development of a cluster of food science lessons for high school students.

Amy M. Rowley and Jerem y S. Peacock are just two of 10 teaching fellows at the University of Georgia supported by an NSF grant to design lessons that are meant to engage students through their stomachs. Rowley, a grad student in the department of food science and technology; Peacock, a grad student in the department of environmental health science; and the other fellows have each been matched with a high school science teacher to develop lessons that present chemistry from a food-science perspective. The fellows spend a day each week in the high school classroom helping teachers implement the lessons. The lesson plans, which are gathered on the university's "Science Behind Our Food" website, meet the National Science Education Standards for chemistry.

In one lesson, the students carry out an activity at each of 10 stations in the classroom. They melt chocolate in their mouths, observe bread dough rising, and prepare Kool-Aid. Then they have to classify what has occurred as either a physical or chemical change.

In another activity, the students measure the conductivity of drinks such as Gatorade and orange juice and learn to relate the measurement to the concentration of electrolytes in the beverages.

The high school students also participate in a semester-long product development competition. "This semester, they have to create a snack food for kids,"; Rowley said. Reflecting recent trends in the business, the snack "has to be healthy."

In preparation for creating a new product, the students first learn "the importance of ingredient functionality in a product--that you choose your ingredients for certain properties and that ingredients are chemicals just like anything else," Rowley said."We have them taste a sugar solution, a Sweet'N Low solution, and a Splenda solution and have them rank the intensities of the sweetness. We talk to them about the different chemical structures" of the sweeteners.

The students move on to product formulation and quality control. For that session, they bake chocolate chip cookies, learning about metric conversions in the process. By trying to make each cookie exactly the same size, they learn about the concepts of accuracy and precision.

Working in teams, the students will ultimately come up with a recipe and carry out sensory evaluations of their new snack products. They'll also come up with plans for how to package, store, and market the snacks. The students will take a trip to the University of Georgia campus, where they will learn about different areas of food science and solicit input on their projects from food scientists.

Among the ideas the students are working on is a fruit shish kebab, an energy-drink popsicle, and individual servings of flavored popcorn similar to small potato chip packages. In the case of the shish kebab, the fruit could be dried or fresh; if the latter, "the shelf life would be shorter and they would have to figure out if they needed to do any calcium dips to preserve the fruit," Rowley said.

The teaching fellows are gathering data this semester to find out whether the students are benefiting from the food science lessons. For now, anecdotal evidence is encouraging.

One teacher said that when he uses the six labs that Rowley and Peacock developed, the students "are so much more well-behaved and on-task, and the end result is so much better than other lab activities ... because they're interested--they're eating, or they're melting something, or cooking something," Rowley said. "So, we've seen that there's real increased interest and ownership in their work."

OF COURSE, nonscience majors aren't the only students benefiting from innovative new courses. At the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Barbara A. Gaddis, director of the Science Learning Center, and Allen M. Schoffstall, a chemistry professor, have designed a course to prepare instructors for teaching undergraduate labs. Instructors are mainly chemistry majors in their senior year who have little or no prior teaching experience.

Offered for the first time in the fall of 2004, the one-credit course has been designed "to identify and address concerns of instructors early in the semester, to discuss common laboratory problem scenarios, to construct recommendations for changes and improvements to the laboratory curriculum, to involve students in the creation and evaluation of discovery experiments, to evaluate new equipment being purchased for the laboratories, and to get instructors involved in possible changes during renovation of the laboratories," according to Gaddis and Schoffstall.

During the course, the professors addressed instructors' concerns about issues such as coordinating lectures and labs, teaching students who were close to their own age--if not older, and lack of consistency in grading lab reports and quizzes. Gaddis and Schoffstall also prepared the instructors by walking them through a variety of scenarios. For instance, the instructors practiced what to do if students came into the lab late or misbehaved. In the future, the course will incorporate training in presentation skills. Instructors will prepare a prelab lecture that will be videotaped and critiqued.

What unites the four courses described here is an emphasis on the perspective of the student--whether that student is in high school or about to head to graduate school. The results seen with these classes suggest that students will offer an enthusiastic reception to teachers who try to understand their point of view.