Monday, July 23, 2007

ChemBuddy

Andrew Merenbach released an update to his ChemBuddy application on Saturday. "ChemBuddy is an open-source chemical analysis program for students, chemists, and hobbyists alike." The open source project had dropped into, in Andrew's words, a "dormant, 'vaporware' status." ChemBuddy is still listed as an alpha release, as some features may be missing, but it still appears to be a useful application for high school chemistry. The current feature list includes:

• Conversions: Heat, Mass, Moles, Pressure, Temperature, and Volume
• Gases: Boyle’s Law, Charles’ Law, Combined Gas Law, Gay-Lussac’s Law, and Ideal Gas Law
• Solutions: Concentration, Dilution, Molality, Molarity, Normality, Solubility, and Titration
• Miscellaneous: Stoichiometry
• A very pretty, if somewhat incomplete in its implementation, periodic table of the elements, with a basic table, a crystal-structures table, an electron-blocks table, a radioactivity table, and a basic states-of-matter table.

ChemBuddy 1.1a5 is available for download from Andrew's Den (1.3 MB). Previous versions are available on SorceForge.net.

Interesting Columns

Two recent columns from the Christian Science Monitor caught my eye today. The first is about a college focusing on academics and stepping down from Division I athletics to Division III. One college's retreat from big-time sports by Carmen K. Sisson tells of Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) President David Pollick's reasoning. "Just one of 117 full scholarships was going to academics. In effect, the school was paying students $3.5 million a year to compete – making them, in Pollick's eyes, professional athletes – and doing so as relatively small players in a big arena."

Now, if we could just get K-12 schools into the same mindset...

In Why children need to learn to play, Laurie Toupin relates that "the concept of 'unstructured, self-initiated play' is vanishing from our culture." It's an interesting read.

Environmental Education Push

Getting an Education as Big as All Outdoors by Raymond McCaffrey tells of Rep. John Sarbanes's push to include his No Child Left Inside amendment (HR 3036) to the federal No Child Left Behind Act that would "serve a multitude of purposes, including getting kids outdoors and creating more environmentally conscious citizens."

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