Chemistry
Chemistry Online High School Course
COURSE LENGTH:
Full Year (30 Sessions)
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This full-year course is an introduction to chemistry. This course is targeting a regular-level experience. We intend to take many small bites out of a very large apple. There will be brief assignments given daily that will allow both introduction and practice with key concepts. The topics grow upon themselves, slowly building up to more complex and abstract ideas. By then, the skills and habits developed will make material that initially appears challenging become quite manageable in practice.
Learning OBJECTIVES:
Students will understand the composition and properties of matter, how matter changes from one form to another, why matter changes from one form to another, and any energy changes that may be associated with these changes.
Students will increase fluency with various measurements and become increasingly comfortable with both large-scale and small-scale measurements.
Students will be able to report and interpret data with an eye towards both precision and accuracy.
Students will be able to analyze and manipulate data while still focusing on precision and accuracy.
Students will be challenged by abstract and sub-microscopic topics that they will visualize and internalize.
Students will appreciate how these fundamental concepts pervade our bodies and our surroundings and how a basic knowledge of chemistry helps to better understand our own existence. Such pressing topics as environmental impacts of our own existence, materials we rely on for our daily life, and even the pharmaceuticals that promise us a better life are all based on chemistry.
ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS:
This course (literally) teaches us how we function in this world and how the innumerable processes that surround us and we take for granted actually work.
This course gives a greater fluency with numeric manipulations and a real sense of judging scale.
This course teaches how to analyze data for both accuracy and precision and allows students to practice reporting data that they have collected on their own.
This course improves visualization skills and abstract reasoning.
This course is an example of how topics that may be preconceived as being challenging or even impossible can be quite manageable if a disciplined and steady approach is taken.