Students in Cuba and the United States participate in a joint exercise entitled Electronic Qualitative Analysis Schemes (EQAS). In this novel exercise students are taught how to develop and write an EQAS in a spreadsheet. Students develop a series of questions that allows other participants to identify a chemical group, then a specific element or simple molecule. Once developed and tested, students exchange their riddles and use a binary code to help determine their unknown species. Each code turns on certain statements that allow students to solve the problem. The entire periodic table and a series of simple molecules can be covered in this exercise. An assessment finds that most general chemistry students participating in the project advanced their knowledge of elemental properties as well as further developed their ability to work with spreadsheets. The American students used an English version of the exercise while students in Havana (Cuba) used a Spanish version. The collaboration was the result of a trip by an American Chemical Society delegation to a conference held in Havana in October, 2006.
Manning et al. (Tue,) studied this question.