We present a laboratory activity designed to teach students procedural development, using commonly encountered substances (i.e. cake) as the unknown sample. Students were challenged to determine the concentration of dye in the cake and were given minimal guidance on how to complete the task. Because of the perceived benign nature of cake, students reported feeling more at ease in lab. Observations of student behavior indicated that students more deeply engaged with this activity compared to more traditional analytical experiments. Providing a safe, but less structured, environment allowed the students to use make use of both their inherent creativity and deploy the full arsenal of their knowledge in order to successfully complete the lab activity.
Dukes et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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