Classroom Connections

The two major focuses that I have here in the R&D Department at Novozymes are to create an absorbance curve for the bicine buffer that we are using and to understand the catalysized rate of absorption of CO2.

For those of your who don’t teach high school chemistry or AP Chemistry, those might not be concepts that you understand. Heck, they’re not concepts that I really understand that well. But I am working on it. And I am glad to have been given the chance to work on it.

Those two concepts are two of my weakest areas in chemistry: kinetics and buffers. Spending the entire summer working with them and trying to understand them from an experimental point of view are definately helping me grasp the ideas and concepts.

It’s also giving me a lot of background to use when it comes time to develop a lesson plan. Since these two areas are some of my weakest, I never really felt confident enough in my understanding to develop labs for them. And that is terrible because all I was doing was allowing my hangups to hamper my student’s ability to experience the science of the topics. After working in R&D for only a few weeks, I have developed a qualitative kinetics lab and a quantitative buffer lab. I am hoping to have a quantitative kinetics lab done before the end of the summer, but the experience I have had so far is invaluable.

I will probably be posting a presentation on here some time soon explaining my experiments and the conclusions that I have reached. The road has been extremely bumpy (2 weeks to isolate all of the variables that were muddying up my data) , but well worth it in the end.