Kitchen Chemistry at Futurelearn

In a new departure The Kitchen Chemist is putting on a free online course as part of the Futurelearn initiative. Are you interested in chemistry that can be done in the kitchen? The course starts in April but you can register now at https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/kitchen-chemistry.

The course is free and forms part of a series of courses that Futurelearn and partners are getting off the ground. It is meant to be open to the widest possible cross-section of the population and as a result enrolment is anticipated to be larger. The course is open to anyone and it is online. Hence the name for this new breed of course Massively Open Online Courses or MOOCs for short.

Many of the experiments in this course will have been adapted from this site, but the advantage of taking the course is that it develops a more-or-less coherent pathway through the subject. The first week is a look at the molecular world, moving on to changes of state. After that we consider solubility and separation science, such as chromatography. No Kitchen Chemistry course would be complete without something about indicators. These are used as acid-base indicators and also to show the presence of iodine. Finally a little catalysis and breakdown of hydrogen peroxide to finish.

The effort should only be a couple of hours per week, which will include experimental time, so there will not be too much material to digest on the web itself. You will also have the chance to upload your results to share with others and you’ll be pointed in various directions around the web for additional material along the way.

If you are already on Twitter the hashtag that is already in use is #FLkitchenchem. I look forward to seeing you there.