IB DP students getting younger
IB Diploma students seem to get younger every day. Three year old Brielle shows off her knowledge about Topic 3: Periodicity on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Maybe it is worth investing in some flash cards...
Heavy metal pollution in Brazil
I’m currently writing the page and accompanying questions for Topic A.10 Environmental impact – heavy metals, which is the last part of Option A. Earlier this month, on 5 November 2015, two dams at the...
Tamoxifen
A drug that has been used since the 1970s both for the prevention and for the treatment of certain types of breast cancer (in both women and men) is tamoxifen. Some breast cancer cells require the female...
IA exercise
Update: The results and analysis of this exercise are now published. Teaching for the second year of the new programme started in August/September and many teachers are beginning to worry about the individual...
Note taking
One of the responsibilities that all teachers have is to guide their students in how to study. One of the key pillars of this is effective note taking. Many schools do set aside some separate time to...
Teacher support material
(Image © IBO) Damned if you do, dammed if you don’t. This is the situation that the IB sometimes finds itself in when it comes to providing Teacher Support Materials. When there are changes to the programme...
It smells fishy to me
“Amines smell of rotting fish” is often quoted in chemistry textbooks. As chemists we should probably look at this the other way round and state that rotting fish smell of amines (the amine functional...
Updated version of the 2014 Guide
Almost exactly one year after the new Chemistry 2014 Guide was published (for first assessment in 2016) an updated version has just appeared on the OCC. This updated version is dated February 2015 and...
A nitrogen-free explosive
Have you ever wonder exactly why airlines are so wary of passengers carrying more than 100 cm3 of liquids on board airplanes? Poster produced by the British Airports Authority © The liquid they are most...
A different type of 'bucky ball'
Most IB teachers and students will know that ‘bucky ball’ is a slang term for the C60 molecule, buckminsterfullerene, which is covered in Sub-topic 4.3 Covalent structures on the syllabus. Buckminsterfullerene,...