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Last Modified: 12:00 PM, Mon Mar 29, 1999

Materials Characterization Project Website (MCPweb)
An Interactive Web-Based Materials Characterization Project for Undergraduate Education in Analytical Chemistry

Much recent attention in chemical education has been focused on the need for "problem-based" learning strategies in the teaching laboratory. Industry and government analytical chemists are concerned that recent chemistry graduates have only a technique-based perspective on chemical analysis instead of viewing chemical analysis as an integrated process based on problem solving. Thus, in academia's zeal to provide hands-on exposure to every new instrumental analysis method that is developed, education of students in the integrated concept of the "analytical process" has been lost.

In order to overcome the problems that smaller schools and institutions would encounter trying to implement a laboratory course similar to the University of Arizona Materials Characterization Project, a version of this lab course is being developed as an interactive, hypermedia-based experience on the World Wide Web (http://mcpweb.chem.arizona.edu). The basic idea of an interactive Web-based experience for students in materials characterization requires the student to chemically analyze several major components of a common commercial product by defining the analysis approach, selecting the analysis method(s), designing the measurement experiments, "collecting" the data, interpreting the data, and arriving at conclusions about chemical composition and content based on the data.