The product of this project will be a Windows-based data acquisition and reduction system for general chemistry laboratories that is based on inexpensive, generic hardware and standard software. The DOS-based LIMSport system which it will succeed has been used for years in our laboratories with success, and has been disseminated nationwide by means of seven, week-long NSF/UFE Summer workshops. Most universities are now converting to Windows-based software. This necessitates a revision of LIMSport, but it also offers an opportunity for substantial improvement. Our system is unique in that it adds data acquisition capability to the most popular spreadsheets (Excel and Lotus), so that students learn standard, transferable methods of data analysis in the laboratory, and teachers can use the system as an authoring language to create their own experiments involving direct data acquisition. We will prepare spreadsheet templates for a number of typical general chemistry experiments which illustrate ways of using the powerful graphical and numerical methods built into modern spreadsheets to reveal trends in real-time data as they are collected. An extensive evaluation plan has been developed to determine which computer methods are most effective in promoting student learning in the laboratory. A laboratory manual will be written for the new Windows/Excel version of LIMSport which incorporates the results of our work as well as features suggested by the large body of research on educational chemistry laboratories. The manual will provide background information for about 30 experiments which are suitable for General Chemistry, using the capability of LIMSport to utilize small quantities of relatively innocuous chemicals.
