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JOHN DOLHUN: I've done these demos
in front of live audiences.
I remember one time I did one demo in front of alumni.
I forget what it was, but it was a failure.
And this one little kid--
he was only about four years old-- he raised his hand.
He said, you win some and you lose some.
SARAH HANSEN: Today on Chalk Radio,
we're talking about the course 5.310, Laboratory Chemistry.
This is a course that not only teaches
students about hands-on science, but also life.
Because working in a lab is a lot like baking--
you can follow recipes, but your cake might still collapse.
I'm your host Sarah Hansen.
In this episode, we're joined by two MIT educators
who have helped shape this standout course.
They'll tell us more about what it
looks like to support students with various academic interests
as they develop lab skills, overcome setbacks, and apply
their studies to real-world problems like water quality.
JOHN DOLHUN: I'm John Dolhun, currently
Director of the Undergraduate Chemistry Teaching Labs at MIT.
SARAH HEWETT: I'm Sarah Hewett and I
am a technical instructor in the Chemistry Department at MIT.
SARAH HANSEN: For many of their students,
5.310 is the first time they step foot in a college level
chemistry lab, and that can be a memorable experience.
JOHN DOLHUN: The first thing you would see
are lines of student coat lockers.
And that's the first thing that students encounter
when they enter the lab.
It's here where they would put their bags,
and they store their lab coats and their goggles.
And you would soon see walking out into the lab
that it's divided into 12 bays.
Each bay has 6 to 7 fume hoods and desk space
for up to 14 students.
SARAH HANSEN: And lots and lots of windows--
something I may have read a bit too much into.
SARAH HEWETT: You can correct me.
I always thought it was because in case there's an explosion,
they want all the windows to blow out instead
of the walls of the building.
JOHN DOLHUN: An-- [LAUGHS]
SARAH HANSEN: Maybe I'm wrong.
JOHN DOLHUN: --explosion.
[LAUGHS]
SARAH HANSEN: John went on to explain
that yes, you would see windows, but explosions, not so much.
Anyway, let's get back to what you actually
would see in this lab.
JOHN DOLHUN: We have some really neat instruments that
the students can operate hands-on,
exactly what the students would experience in industry--
Cary 60 UV-Vis spectrometers, state of the art
density meters and refractometers,
and one of the really exciting instruments
is an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer.
There are only two of these at MIT.
And this instrument is used exclusively in 5.310,
and the students actually use that to test their river
samples to determine the concentration of 29 different
elements down to the part per trillion level.
So it's pretty exciting.
SARAH HANSEN: The river sample testing is part of what makes
5.310 unique.
Students get to take their lab work right into Boston's
own Charles River.
SARAH HEWETT: Yes.
The most exciting experiment, I think, for most of the students
is the Ellen Swallow Richards Lab.
So the students actually go down to the river
and take water samples.
And then they get to analyze those samples back up
in the lab for dissolved oxygen, phosphate concentration,
and a bunch of other elements.
So they get to learn a little bit
about environmental chemistry, and analytical chemistry,
and different techniques that we use
for those types of analysis.
And the students really like that because it's
very applicable to the Charles River
and to the Boston environment.
And they can see it and say, oh, wow, I'm
actually doing something that's kind of useful
and something that-- they always hear
about how dirty the Charles River used to be,
and they're actually kind of surprised
when they do the lab now about how good the water quality is.
SARAH HANSEN: You may have caught
that Sarah and John referred to this as the Ellen Swallow
Richards Lab.
It's a namesake with significant meaning.
JOHN DOLHUN: When I wrote this lab in 2010,
I actually called it the Charles River Lab.
The reason I wrote the lab was to introduce an environmental
component into the 5.310 Laboratory Chemistry course.
And sometime after I had wrote the lab,
I actually was walking through the halls at MIT,
and somehow I ended up in the lobby of Building 2.
And I looked up and I saw this plaque and this photo
of this woman on the wall.
And I started reading it and it said,
this was the first female student ever admitted to MIT
who graduated in 1873.
It was Ellen Swallow Richards, who
was an industrial safety engineer
and environmental chemist.
And it was really her work, I think,
in 1887 which led to the first state water quality
standards in the nation.
And that was very significant, and that kind of
moved me to rename the Charles River Lab the Ellen Swallow
Richards Lab.
SARAH HANSEN: The groundwork laid by Ellen Swallow Richards
has never been more important in a way that feels particularly
relevant for my own community and likely for some of yours.
SARAH HEWETT: One of the local issues
that has come up in the Cambridge area
and around the country is the issue of PFAS, which
are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,
which are man made chemicals that have been around
for less than 100 years.
So they're relatively new, but they
encompass things like Teflon and other chemicals
like that that are involved in non-stick coatings for food
and also in fire suppression technology because they're
really flame resistant, and stain resistant,
and stick resistant.
So now they're being detected in water supplies
and in the food chain, and scientists
are pretty worried about their impact on human health.
And they're still not entirely sure what all of the impacts
are, but there's been a lot of research
recently into detecting these in the environment
and trying to figure out what their impact is on health.
SARAH HANSEN: As you might imagine,
most students aren't ready to go out into the field on Day 1 one
of 5.310.
The first step is learning how to be safe in the lab.
And learning how to interact with chemicals and instruments
in the lab can be daunting.
JOHN DOLHUN: They're coming in and they're afraid.
Some of them have never, ever been in a wet lab before.
You've got to make them feel really comfortable, even
though they might be a fourth year
student at MIT, graduating.
SARAH HEWETT: The really fun thing about 5.310 is that there
isn't really a typical student.
We get students from all types of majors that take the course.
So it's a requirement for medical school
and it's a requirement for the chemical engineering major,
so we get a bunch of chemical engineers
and some med school or pre-med students.
But they all come from majors all across the Institute,
which is really fun.
So even though a lot of them have not taken
a chemistry lab maybe since high school
or ever, they have a lot of science knowledge and knowledge
of other things that is always kind of interesting.
Sometimes after the lectures they'll come up
and say, oh, this reminds me of something from my other class.
And that's how I learn a lot, too, just from talking to them
and hearing about their experiences.
They actually end up helping each other.
So some of them who say, oh, I've worked in a biology lab,
I might have more experience with pipetting
can help students who maybe have not taken
a lab class in many years.
SARAH HANSEN: For beginner and experienced chemistry students
alike, 5.310's labs are a challenge.
That means John and Sarah have thought carefully
about what kinds of support their students might need.
JOHN DOLHUN: Many, many schools use a lab manual,
and they use experiments that are very clearly published out.
And the students go through maybe 12 experiments
in a semester and they're very systematic in terms
of the types of experiments that are there--
the traditional experiments.
But with MIT, some of the experiments
are multi-day, multifaceted experiments
that are actually put together and can be quite challenging.
A typical experiment could be 50 to 60 pages long.
In terms of helping them deal with frustration,
I believe in divide and conquer.
For example, one of the things that's
very difficult, and challenging, and stressful
might be writing up the lab report.
That might take them 10 to 15 hours of time.
So we teach them how to break this up
to deal with small frustrations systematically.
Do small parts of it early on and don't
wait till the end to do the whole thing.
It's kind of like them working on tiny anthills instead
of a big mountain.
And so, by forming these good habits,
they'll soon be able to deal with
mountain-sized frustration.
I'm a product of MIT and it works for me.
SARAH HANSEN: In addition to building
the perseverance chemistry requires,
both students and instructors are also
actively cultivating curiosity and making
mistakes in the process.
JOHN DOLHUN: Students love diapers.
And as soon as you pull a diaper out,
that totally gets them relaxed and loosens them up.
The polymer demo is all about sodium polyacrylamide,
and that's the diaper polymer.
That's the chemical in the diapers that absorbs the water
at 800 times its weight.
[LAUGHS]
When I do this demo, I usually call on a volunteer.
And unbeknownst to the volunteer,
I've already put some powder in the cup.
And I start pouring water in a cup
and I ask the volunteer to tell me when to stop.
When they tell me to stop, I put a plastic cover on the cup,
and turn it over, and then I put it on their head.
Usually I ask them to hold it so they
can assume any responsibility for that water
in the cup coming out.
But usually, nothing comes out because the polymer has
absorbed all the water, right?
You get this beautiful globular polymer inside this cup.
And you knock it out into a dish, and you can see it.
But I remember when I did this demo at one of the MIT parents'
visiting weekends.
And there were about 70 to 80 people in the audience,
and I asked for a volunteer to come down.
So he came down, but he didn't tell me
soon enough to stop pouring the water in the cup.
So I just kept going till he said stop, right?
So I covered the cup up very carefully,
turned it over on this hard plastic,
and I put it on his head.
And the polymer and all the water,
when I pulled the card out, it all came out
and it messed up his hairdo.
It was a gooey, gooey mess, and the audience just loved it.
I mean, we had to clean him up with paper towels in front
of everybody.
So there's often unexpected fun in these live demos.
SARAH HEWETT: Yes.
I think that's one of the fun parts about the lab,
is that not everything works.
It doesn't work always for demos.
But even in the lab you can have two students follow
the exact same procedure, and sometimes
it just doesn't come out.
Or they'll make one little error that they didn't even notice,
and then it won't work.
And so that is definitely something
that we deal with a lot in the lab--
dealing with that frustration and having the students
say, well, trying to figure out what went wrong
and how to fix it for next time.
But that is a big part of what happens in the lab,
and a big lesson I think that comes out
that's very unrelated to chemistry but very important
for life.
SARAH HANSEN: Another important aspect of this course
is its emphasis on science communication.
JOHN DOLHUN: A few years ago, we looked at the course
and we saw the necessity of writing and for the students
to be able to communicate their work to a general audience
of non-scientists.
By working with writing, rhetoric,
and professional communication instructors,
students learn how to write and present the paper
to a general audience.
SARAH HEWETT: We came up with a bunch of different topics
that are related to water quality, and the Charles River,
and all of the data that we gather for that lab.
Students can choose which genre they would like to write.
So some examples that we have are,
there's a hospital memo about mercury levels in fish
that we measure with our mercury analyzer.
So they can use the data to make arguments about that.
There are policy memos for the government talking
about why it's important to limit phosphate concentration
and pollution in the water.
It challenges them to think about how
to communicate science in these different ways.
And the writing instructors have been
amazing in helping them learn how to write
in these different styles.
I never learned to write science from a writing perspective--
it was always just in my science classes from other scientists.
And so I would recommend it to any other instructor
to bring in writing help if you have it because it carries over
to their lab reports, too, because they have
all these skills of how to read their own work,
and how to assess it for clarity, and all those things.
SARAH HANSEN: One thing about MIT faculty
that we love is their commitment to sharing their teaching
materials with everyone.
I was curious what motivated Sarah and John to do this.
SARAH HEWETT: Sharing the course materials
is a really helpful resource to other instructors
because I know I've benefited from talking to people that I
went to graduate school with about what they're doing,
and going to conferences, and learning from other people.
And so the more that we can share and make
available these materials, the more it
can help other instructors, and also
to introduce more people to chemistry.
If they have their one experience of a chemistry
course, then maybe they can go online and see,
hey, maybe this other place is taught
in a different way that's way more interesting,
or, I think that that's something
that I might like to do.
So I think it benefits everybody to be
more open with what's going on.
JOHN DOLHUN: OpenCourseWare has such a good reputation
in terms of people all over the world that actually
turn to OpenCourseWare to open a course
and actually learn the material from that course.
I've had students-- freshman advisees--
who have come in who've learned everything that they
know from OpenCourseWare.
It's quite dramatic when you have a student come in
and they literally can test out of every subject,
but they've learned all of those subjects
from watching OpenCourseWare.
SARAH HANSEN: Before we go, I also asked
Sarah and John what they would like to ask you,
our listeners, about teaching laboratory chemistry.
JOHN DOLHUN: Yeah.
I think I'd be curious to know what
demos some of the other educators
do in their laboratory chemistry courses,
and also what types of non-traditional labs
they're running.
SARAH HEWETT: I think my favorite question
to ask other lab instructors is, what
is the purpose of teaching lab?
So a lot of people have different answers
to that, which is always kind of interesting.
And then, also, another question that I've been thinking about
is how to prepare students for what they're
going to be doing next, whether it's going into industry,
or academia, or pre-med.
What can we do in the lab to help them
with that, whether it's chemistry or related or not?
SARAH HANSEN: If you have insights to share,
please get in touch with me the link in our show notes.
I'll be sure to pass your ideas along to John, Sarah,
and other listeners.
If you're interested in learning more about laboratory chemistry
or remixing Sarah and John's open educational resources
in your own teaching, head on over to our MIT OpenCourseWare
website.
Thank you so much for listening.
Until next time, signing off.
From near the Charles River, I'm your host Sarah Hansen
from MIT OpenCourseWare.
Chalk Radio's producers include myself, Brett Paci
and Dave Lishanksy.
Scriptwriting assistance from Aubrey Calaway.
Show notes for this episode were written by Peter Chipman.
The 5.310 course site was built by Alicia Franke.
We're funded by MIT Open Learning and supporters
like you.
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