Fundamentals of Chemistry I, Dr. Topham, Fall 2019
This course was definitely required more work for me since I had not taken a chemistry course since high school. I had questioned why I was going to take an honors chemistry class with having so many gap years, but I determined I was up to the challenge. It was not hard work, it was different work. In this class, we were required to take quests every other week that showed if we had mastered concepts we learned in lecture. The catch was that we had to pass all 7 primary objectives demonstrating proficiency (at least 80% on each quest) to pass the class. The more secondary objectives we passed, the higher our final grade would be. The quests were the more challenging part of the course for me.
For the lab component of the grade, we had more writing-infused assignments. These assignments included: pre-lab work, lab notebook journal entries, graphs and calculations, and post-lab work- I do not have much experience with scientific writing, so this was not my favorite part, but it was manageable. We were expected to write up lab reports as our post-lab/homework assignment. What I liked most about the lab reports is that we broke it up into sections so that we did a full lab report piece by piece. By the end of the semester, we were expected to combine each part to form an example of what a lab report would look like.
I have provided one of the last lab reports we did that included the parts of a lab report.