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This repo is meant to host materials for a computational lab aimed at undergraduates without any coding experience who are taking General Chemistry. The purpose of this lab is to use exploration of the concept of chemical kinetics as a vehicle for students to improve computer literacy as well as mathematical intuition. The procedure of this lab includes the execution of simple python scripts organized into a jupyter notebook. While no coding is done, the code itself is written to prioritize readability, encouraging students to read through it and digest what each block of code does. The procedure also generates a relatively large csv file, which the student is instructed to analyze with Excel. It is reccomended that the time step for the simulation to be kept very small, so students must learn how to import text files into Excel instead of transcribing data by hand, and so students must use built-in shortcuts to perform any of the needed actions on the data.
This zip file contains all the supplementary materials needed for a student to perform this computational experiment. Included are
- Excel Instructions (pdf)
- File Import Instructions (pdf)
- Procedure (pdf)
- Fillout (docx)
This jupyter notebook contains all the code which generates the data for post-lab analysis, as well as some supplementary material for the student. In order, it contains
- Written mathematical explanation of the function of the contained code
- Animated explanation of the function of the contained code
- Instructions on how to run the code
- A cell containing only numerical variable assignments with explanatory in-line comments.
- A cell containing the code to perform the simulation and plot the generated data
The script for the animation giving visual explanation on integrators. If you wish to play with this, your first must set up manim on your machine.