Workshop on ChemCollective Virtual Lab

Introduction

The ChemCollective Virtual Lab is a simulation of a chemistry lab. It is designed to help students perform chemistry laboratory experiments. The lab allows students to select from hundreds of standard reagents (aqueous) and manipulate them in a manner resembling a real lab. The ChemCollective Virtual Lab software works on Windows, Mac and Linux machines and is  available free of charge to all educators and students.

The FOSSEE (Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education) project at IIT Bombay (https://fossee.in) has been promoting ChemCollective, and other FLOSS, such as Jmol Application, GeoGebra, PhET Simulations, Scilab, R, Drupal and Linux, and open source hardware, such as Arduino and OpenPLC. The FOSSEE Project is funded by NMEICT, Ministry of Education, Govt. of India.

Methodology of the Workshop

The workshop will be for 5 days, 3 hrs of lectures/hands on sessions on each day. The workshop will be conducted using a mix of pre-recorded spoken tutorial videos with side by side learning and live lectures. A practice problem/assignment will also be provided after every topic followed by discussions on them to get a good understanding of each topic.

All participants will get the ChemCollective Virtual Lab software, Spoken Tutorials on ChemCollective Virtual Lab, copies of our slides, video recording of all lectures, and several solved problems. Using these all who are interested in conducting  ChemCollective Virtual Lab workshops by themselves can do so.  They will also get exposed to the collaborative content creation activity of the FOSSEE Project.

Benefits of the Workshop

On successful completion of the workshop, participants will be able to 

• Learn to perform basic chemistry laboratory experiments using ChemCollective Virtual Lab.
• Learn about ChemCollective resources that are useful in classroom teaching as well as other scientific and academic purposes.
• Certificate for attending the ChemCollective Virtual Lab workshop.

Course content

The aim of this workshop is to train the teachers to provide online chemistry lab experience to the students who missed the practical lab sessions due to the ongoing COVID pandemic. This will be useful for students to understand the basic chemistry lab experiments.

Although Chemistry labs are extremely important, because of the pandemic, no labs could be conducted in the current semester.  It is possible that this situation will continue in the next semester also.  ChemCollective Virtual Labs, proposed to be covered in this workshop, can mitigate this difficulty substantially, and has the potential to reduce the number of actual labs required to complete the learning process, whenever the contact labs resume.

The training will help teachers in using the ChemCollective Virtual lab software to develop their own lab courses using the reagents and apparatus available on the software interface.

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• prepare standard solutions
• dilute solutions and measure pH 
• measure density of solids and liquids
• perform experiments on solubility of solids 
• determine solubility product
• perform acid-base titrations
• prepare buffer solutions
• perform metal displacement reactions

In addition, the participants will be exposed to advanced topics, such as measurement of heat of reactions (enthalpy), measurement of equilibrium constant and gravimetric  analysis.

Teaching Faculty

• Prof. Kannan Moudgalya, Faculty, Chemical Engineering Department, IIT Bombay.
• Dr. Snehalatha Kaliappan, Senior Project Research Scientist, Spoken Tutorial Project, IIT  Bombay.
• Dr. Rani Parvathy, Project Research Scientist, Spoken Tutorial Project, IIT  Bombay.

Who Should Attend

The ChemCollective Virtual Lab workshop will be useful for below discipline:

• Chemistry 
• Pharmacy 
• Biochemistry 
• Biotechnology
• Engineering 1st year students

Duration and Venue

5 day workshop is from 14 June to 18 June 2021. Every day there will be an online interactive/ hands-on session for 3 hours.

Criteria for Certification

Participation certificates, in an electronic form, will be provided to all participants after successful completion of the workshop

Course Fee

How to Apply

• To participate in this workshop, you need to have an invitation email from eoutreach team, IIT Bombay.
• After clicking the invitation link you will get the registration form. If you wish to attend the workshop you must fill up the registration form.
• After you submit the registration form for the workshop, you will receive an automated confirmation email.
• Press the “Decline” button, if you are not participating in the workshop.

Registration URL:- http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/nmeict

The registration form will be available until 08 June 2021.

Accommodation

Not applicable

Note

• As the workshop is conducted online, it is mandatory to have a desktop/ laptop with an external mouse and a working internet connection with good bandwidth.  The laptop should be capable of running ChemCollective Virtual Labs software.

Technical Requirements:

• ChemCollective Virtual Labs Version 2.1.0  

Following operating systems can be used for installing ChemCollective Virtual Labs:

• Windows: 64-bit, Windows 7 or above
• Linux: 64-bit, Ubuntu 16.04 or above 
• Mac OS: 10.7 or newer

Contact Us

• Any queries related to Spoken Tutorials on ChemCollective Virtual Lab can be asked through Spoken Tutorial Forums.
• You can also send the queries regarding ChemCollectve Virtual Labs to workshops@spoken-tutorial.org
  
• Any other general queries about the workshop can be sent to eoutreach@it.iitb.ac.in

Address For Communication

Mahendra Parmar,
Sr. Project Manager, ESOS Project
Department of CSE, Kanwal Rekhi Building,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay,
Mumbai - 400 076.
Email: eoutreach@it.iitb.ac.in
Website - www.it.iitb.ac.in/nmeict