Secondary School Feature Articles
	Criteria for an "Outstanding" High School Chemistry Web Site, by Lisa Barry
	Curriculum Alignment Projects: Toward Developing a Need to Know, by K. David Pinkerton
	Classroom Activity: #33. Sink or Swim: The Cartesian Diver, by K. David Pinkerton

Bicarbonate squeeze play
photo by K. David Pinkerton

Diving for Conceptual Understanding

The familiar Cartesian diver toy provides a great visual demonstration of the relationship of pressure and volume. K. David Pinkerton has developed a learning project that uses a student-constructed, chemically driven diver as an authentic assessment of concepts learned. The students must apply their understanding of the gas laws, stoichiometry, thermochemistry, kinetic molecular theory, and other principles in order to make their diver reach the bottom of the container in one minute. Culminating a semester of study, Pinkerton calls his approach a "Curriculum Alignment Project" and you can read about it in his article. JCE Classroom Activity #33, by the same author, includes a variety of methods of making and using Cartesian divers to explore pressure, volume, and temperature relationships.

In "Beyond Density: An Inquiry-Based Activity Involving Students Searching for Relationships", Stephen DeMeo describes an approach that guides students to construct relationships between an object's properties and the volume of water it displaces. If you are tired of having students perform traditional density determination experiments only to discover within a few weeks that they do not actually understand property-volume relationships, I encourage you to read this article.

If you integrate environmental issues and concepts into your teaching or if you teach an environmental science course, the article "Biosphere 2: A Place for Integrative Studies in Chemical Research and Chemical Education in Defense of Planet Earth", will be a good source of information about current controlled research on ecosystems. The once-maligned Biosphere project, designed to study closed life-support systems, has been modified to use in conducting research on six types of ecosystems.

Many teachers are taking advantage of the World Wide Web by designing or planning to design a Web site for their classes. If you are a Web site user or potential developer, an article outlining the "Criteria for an 'Outstanding' High School Chemistry Web Site", may be of interest. Pennsylvania teacher Lisa Barry provides a concise six-point analysis that is easy to use in evaluating Web sites. You may want to incorporate an activity into your curriculum based on this article by having students identify a chemistry-related Web site and then use the six-point process to analyze and critique it. This will not only familiarize the students with the information relative to chemistry that is available online, but it will also enable them to review the site as "an educated consumer" to determine its accuracy.

High School Programs at ACS Meetings: San Diego in March

Have you been to a High School Program at the American Chemical Society Meeting yet? If not, you are missing what might be described as the Society's best kept secret. The workshop-style meetings capture the flavor of a ChemEd or BCCE conference all packed into one day. Sponsored by the Division of Chemical Education of the ACS, High School Day programs have been held during the past several years in conjunction with the Spring and Fall National American Chemical Society Meetings. In 2000 the programs were held in San Francisco and Washington, DC. In each case, nearly all of the approximately 100 teachers who attended lived within easy driving distance of the meeting site.

Recently, a High School Program was held as part of the Southeast-Southwest Regional Meeting in New Orleans on December 7, 2000. Dodie Wells, who teaches in New Orleans, organized the event, which was attended by approximately 60 teachers from Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi. The resource-rich program included 12 workshops and an awards luncheon. High School Programs are supported in part by local sections of ACS and these sections also often provide direct support to high school teachers in the form of registration fees and travel.

Be sure to look for the High School Program in your area, and join us! The number of teachers who attend is a small fraction of the total who are within driving distance of the meeting, so help us get the word out. The program organizer, a high school teacher like yourself, will welcome your help. You do not need to be a member of ACS to attend. For more information, visit the local section page of the ACS Web site.

The next High School Program will be held in San Diego on Tuesday, April 3, in conjunction with the Spring 2001 meeting. Don't miss it if you live in the San Diego area. Full program information will be available in the March issue of the Journal. Program organizer Joe Baron (La Jolla High School) is planning a full day of interesting workshops that will provide you with new ideas and techniques to use in your classroom.