Wired Science

Long Distance Learning Brings Chem Labs into the Comfort of Homes

You may not be able to get your kicks from a chemistry set anymore, but that doesn't mean you can't learn chemistry at home. More than half of all U.S. colleges and degree-granting institutions offer distance-learning courses, classes that students complete without having to set foot in a classroom. And thanks to the work of a few dedicated teachers, a growing number of them are offering chemistry labs.

After all, every home contains a makeshift lab anyway—the kitchen.

"You do chemistry in your kitchen all the time," says Jimmy  Reeves, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. "When you bake a potato, you're doing chemistry."

Reeves and his colleagues have developed chemistry lab courses that students at his university and a nearby community college do in the kitchen. His lab experiments are designed to address the same types of questions asked of students in normal college chemistry lab courses. To investigate acid-base properties, for example, students in Reeves' labs are asked to boil a red cabbage—its juice serves as an excellent acid-base indicator. To measure heat capacity—the amount of heat it takes to raise an object's temperature by one degree—Reeves has students boil a penny, transfer it into a cup of water, and then measure how much the water temperature rises.

Although "kitchen chemistry" might sound like a disaster waiting to happen, Reeves says that safety really isn't much of an issue. None of his experiments rely on dangerous techniques or strong chemicals—vinegar and baking soda are about as strong as they get. "The procedures that we ask people to do are no more dangerous than normal cooking procedures," he explains.

And although his experiments may not be as "exact" as those that would be done in a real lab, results from lab practicals show that his students learn at least as well as, if not better, than, students in normal college laboratory courses. Reeves hopes that this data will convince other distance-learning universities to offer his courses, too.

"If you're not actually pouring liquids and weighing solids, most chemists would say you're not doing chemistry," Reeves says. "That's what we want to train people to be able to do."