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Course details
Explore comprehensive course materials and learning objectives designed for your growth.
About the course
Every year the AP Chemistry exam sets an experimental-design question, and every year it is answered worse than any content question on the paper. The reason is simple: most students have followed laboratory instructions many times and designed an experiment never.
Twelve students, thirteen Saturdays, one bench each. You run every experiment yourself, in your own kitchen, with your camera pointing at your hands rather than your face — and I watch, in real time, and tell you when your technique will cost you the result.
The kit
Posted to you when you enrol, anywhere we can ship. It contains a burette, a stand, a digital balance to two decimal places, a basic colorimeter, and the reagents for all eleven experiments. Nothing in it is hazardous and every reagent is disposable down a domestic drain, which is a genuine constraint on the syllabus and is stated plainly rather than pretended away.
The eleven experiments
Gravimetric determination of a hydrate formula
Standardising a sodium hydroxide solution
Titration of a weak acid, with the full curve plotted point by point
Beer's law and a calibration curve for a coloured complex
Determining a rate law by initial rates
Measuring an equilibrium constant by colorimetry
Calorimetry: enthalpy of neutralisation, with a heat-loss correction
Hess's law by an indirect route
A simple galvanic cell and its measured potential
Paper chromatography and Rf determination
A cold design: a question you have not seen, a bench, and three hours
How the write-ups work
You run the experiment during the live session with me watching
You submit raw data within 24 hours — raw, not processed, because the processing is where the marks are
You write the report over the following week
I return it with line-level comments, and roughly half of the first four reports come back for a rewrite
Access ends when the seminar ends
This is the one batch where the recordings do not stay in your library afterwards. The sessions are live, unedited, and show twelve students' hands, faces and homes; keeping them indefinitely is not something the cohort has agreed to. Your own reports, data and my comments are yours to keep and export. The recordings close two weeks after the final session, and that is stated here rather than buried in a policy.
Twelve seats, because that is how many benches I can watch at once. Enrolment closes 9 September; kits post within two days of enrolling and take up to a fortnight to reach some destinations, so early is better.
In this course you will be able to
Design a controlled experiment to test a stated hypothesis, with variables and controls identified explicitly
Answer the experimental-design free-response question, which appears every year and which most students fumble
Propagate uncertainty through a multi-step calculation and quote a result with a defensible number of significant figures
Build a calibration curve and use it, understanding why extrapolating past it is not allowed
Identify the dominant source of error in a procedure before running it, not afterwards
Write a laboratory report that would pass in a first-year university course
Critique a published method and name what it fails to control
Prerequisite
AP Chemistry in progress or complete — this seminar assumes the content and teaches the practice
Access to a home kit, posted to you at enrolment, and a work surface you may use for two hours a week
Available live at 8:00 PM Singapore Time on Saturdays; this cohort is scheduled for the Asia-Pacific band
An adult present for the four sessions flagged in the safety brief. Nothing in the kit is hazardous, but the rule is not waived
Six hours a week for thirteen weeks including the session and the write-up
A camera you can point at your bench
Topics covered
What a controlled experiment is, and why most school labs are demonstrations insteadGravimetric analysis and the sources of error nobody mentionsTitration technique: burette handling, indicator choice and endpoint versus equivalenceStandardisation of a solution, and why it comes before every titration that mattersSpectrophotometry, Beer's law and building a calibration curveDetermining a rate law experimentally by the method of initial ratesMeasuring an equilibrium constant, and the assumptions hidden in the methodCalorimetry, heat capacity of the calorimeter and correcting for heat lossElectrochemical cells, measuring cell potential and comparing to the calculated valueChromatography and separation as an analytical techniqueError analysis: random versus systematic, and propagating uncertainty through a calculationSignificant figures as a claim about precision rather than a formatting ruleGraphing for linearisation, and what a slope actually representsWriting a laboratory report to the conventions the AP exam and first-year college expectDesigning an experiment to answer a question you were handed coldReading a published method critically
