Much noise is made in education circles about getting “technology” in the scence classroom. As near as I can tell from observing this noise, “technology” seems to be putting overheads into Powerpoint presentations instead of on traditional overhead projectors and putting CDs containing multimedia that can be viewed only under certain operating system versions.
Me, I would much rather focus on technology that helps my students spend their time productively in the laboratory. Here’s a picture of the IR spectrometer my school had when I came to work here:
![[Old IR]](http://rickandpatty.com/blogfiles/oldir1.jpg)
Even though it was purchased in the 90s, it looks so … old and cranky. Look at the controls:
![[Old IR control panel]](http://rickandpatty.com/blogfiles/oldir2.jpg)
This is the kind of machine, frankly, that turns students off of analytical chemistry. Even in the 90s, this could have been done better. You can’t read the control panel in the picture, but most of the buttons have several functions each, and it’s not really obvious which buttons are appropriate to use at the time (especially if you are a student who is just learning about IR). In fact, when using this particular IR for student experiments in freshmen-level chemistry and our analytical class for technicians, I spent more time telling students what buttons to push and helping them get the instrument to cooperate than I did on things like helping students prepare samples and interpret the spectra. Chemistry should not be arcane button-pushing! (Leave that sort of thing to system administrators…)
Good technology ought to allow the students to be able to focus on the chemistry rather than the buttons. Any talk of technology in the science classroom ought to address this sort of thing rather than trying to dazzle students with little videos or animations.
When it became troublesome to get parts and service for the instrument, I went on the hunt for something specifically more friendly. Enter this little beastie (a Nicolet IR-100):
![[New IR]](http://rickandpatty.com/blogfiles/newir1.jpg)
Note the lack of a panel of strangely labeled buttons. Everything is accessable through a nice friendly panel of clickable on-screen buttons. Things like collecting a background or sample scan, printing, and saving the spectrum to a file are in plain view. And you can put notes on your spectrum without sacrificing a goat! (Okay, the goat bit was an exaggeration, but …)
This is an instrument that students can learn to use in only a few minutes, and they then have time to think about what we really want to think about – how to prepare samples, how to find the important features on an IR spectrum, etc.
In most science courses, students spend either the same amount or more time in the laboratory than they do in the lecture. Let’s make sure the students lab ecperience teaches them something other than how to push buttons!