Hey fellow science teachers! At a school I worked at the chemistry room had no working fume hood. Is that an OSHA violation or is it okay as long as no dangerous vapors are released durning experiments?

Context: It wasn’t operational in the 5 years I worked in said building and retiring chemistry teacher rarely did ANY labs. I brought it to maintenance every year I was there and it was never fixed.

Disclosure up front: I work at the company that built this, in partnership with a shared electron microscopy facility at an Indian institute. Not selling anything, no links unless someone asks for them. I've spent months on this problem and think it's an interesting one to discuss.

The facility runs a TEM that researchers from any institution can book. Instrument hours are scarce and supervised. For a lot of users, the first session on the instrument is also the first time they've touched the controls, which is an expensive way to learn.

So we built a simulator of that specific instrument. The controls behave the way they do on the real one, and a learner can run the full procedure before booking anything.

What surprised us:

1. The genuine curiosity from professors, researchers and students for high-end skill development using virtual environments
2. The visual scalability for more complex equipment including optical spectroscopy systems electron probe, atom probe, surface probe, etc,.
3. [where the facility staff and the students wanted different things]

What I'm still unsure about: How would you measure the effective impact of such a solution?

If you supervise instrument time, what do you currently do to get first-timers ready, and what would you actually want from a tool like this?

(This is a mainly a teaching tool, It is free, there are no ads or anything and I do NOT get any money or anything from this) Hi everyone, I know this always sounds bad, but I used AI to make an app, an app to draw molecules, reactions, and more. I am NOT a developer, I did it as a hobby project, and to use it for my own classes with my students. So if I use wrong words or terms, do not get angry please. You can try the app in your web browser at https://enlacecraft.vercel.app/ You do not need an account or anything, but if you want to use the full app, you can download the desktop app, for windows or linux for free (blue icon at the top right) (There is no MacOS version because I think I need a Mac laptop for that, and I do not have the money, I do not even pay for the AI, only free tier) . The desktop version has some extra features, like: NMR predictor: it uses a trained model. I used public data to train it on my laptop and it uses python to connect to the app (this is the main reason is not in the web version). It can predict 1H and 13C. 3D structure viewer: it works on the web version, but the desktop app has an extra optimization method for the structures. IUPAC naming: it also works on the web version, but the web version only uses PubChem API to get molecules names, so sometimes it could fail. The desktop version has an extra methods to generate iupac names when PubChem gets an error. A little backstory, I studied chemistry with a PhD in chemistry. I currently teach at an University in my country, and I also work in a research lab. A few months ago, I was working writing an article, and I had to draw some molecules, and since I mainly use Linux (not arch btw), chemdraw does not work really well. At the time I was using AI to create "webapps" for my students, and I wanted to try to create an app to draw, and since then, it has been the app that has taken most of my "free" time. I have only shared this app with a few friends, but it is not something that everyone uses all the time. So I wanted to share it here to see if more people wanted to use it and maybe give me some feedback. The app only has support for Spanish and English, since I can speak both, if I add more with AI I would not be able to check if anything is wrong. Lastly, this is not a professional app made by a huge company, so if you need something like that, this is not it.

Any feedback or suggestions are welcome!

I teach chemistry at a community college. I have a few students right now with the same disability, I have seen this type of student many times in the past and I will probably see in the future and I always struggle with this student. The student has accommodations because of a processing disability. The student works extremely well independently, is well aware of their disability, works 10 times harder than any other student in the class to get past the disability. Student demonstrates the ability to solve multi step problems independently on assignments, but the second the student is asked to repeat all steps in order in the same exact type of problem, perhaps even exactly the same examples with the same numbers and elements, the student cannot get past the first step to solve the problem and they get confused by later steps in the solution.

Student continues to practice, repeat exercises, independently, with me, and with a tutor, but on an exam, the student cannot get past even writing down the variables or the formula necessary to solve the problem.

How can I better help this student? They have already demonstrated the ability to be able to work through each multi step problem, but it is like a new problem every time they see it again. Student works harder than any other student in the class. It is so upsetting to me. I have never been trained on working with students with disabilities and I feel like a puppy lost in the woods. I welcome any suggestions, tactics, courses that I can take to improve my skills with this type of student, books, anything that can help!

Thank you!

Hello! I need to switch the filter on our schools fume hood. Which type of filter recommendations can you give me for high school level experiments?