A growing national awareness indicates that traditional ways of teaching chemistry often fail to communicate to students the excitement and intellectual challenge of the science experienced by practicing chemists. One emerging model that addresses this concern introduces discovery early in the chemistry curriculum. Verification experiments where students prove the validity of lecture material are replaced by cooperative exercises designed to allow students to discover for themselves fundamental concepts of the science. These laboratory discoveries then serve as the starting point for lecture discussions. The Department of Chemistry at Centenary College has committed itself to this discovery-based method of teaching. Discovery-based teaching, especially in organic chemistry, depends extensively on instrumentation. This project makes use of a number of simple gas chromatographs and integrators in several discovery-based experiments. Organic experiments are designed to allow students to investigate the correlation of physical properties with structure, and the parameters that govern nucleophilic substitution. In addition to these that depend on gas chromatography's power to separate and quantitate, the instruments also are being used as preparative tools in other experiments. Finally, the simple, rugged design of the gas chromatographs makes it possible to introduce several experiments using this instrumentation into the higher enrollment introductory course.
