My Notes
Categories
Lignin material from plants may be transformed into useful organic materials. This LO is part of a special VIPEr collection honoring the 2022 ACS National Award recipients in the field of inorganic chemistry. Mahdi Abu Omar was the recipient of the ACS Award in Green Chemistry for his contributions to fundamental science and technology development for catalytic lignin conversion to renewable chemicals, fuels, and materials following green chemistry and engineering principles.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| student handout | 167.14 KB |
The goals of this literature discussion are to:
- explore the work (and background) of a scientist who won a national Green Chemistry award
- use guided reading questions to understand the central goals of an interesting field of chemistry
- understand basic science (thermodynamics) motivating research in Green Chemistry
- identify desirable and undesirable outcomes of the selective deoxygenation process described in the article
This literature discussion would be appropriate for a course on Green Chemistry, Polymers, or Materials or as a brief introduction to these ideas in an upper level inorganic course. If I were implementing this in class, I'd give the students the discussion questions and a link to the article about a week ahead of the class time we would reserve for discussion. If someone wanted to use this in an instrumentation class, there is significant use of it in the paper even though we mostly focused on other things.
Evaluation
There are multiple ways to evaluate the student answers to these questions. I prefer having the students answer the questions for homework (perhaps splitting up the questions or having them complete them in groups), and submitting them electronically before class and then discuss the answers in class. I sometimes offer the chance to revise and submit answers after the discussion. Since I haven’t yet done this exercise in class, I will report what I do when I am able to do it.
I have not yet used this in the classroom, but I will update it when I do.