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Organic chemistry, a course considered intimidating by many students, desperately needs an ambassador. California Professor of the Year Neil Garg, who has been wildly successful in getting UCLA students to love organic chemistry, is more than happy to fill that role.
"The field of organic chemistry has made a tremendous mistake," Garg said, "in not showing students and the general public its importance and why they should love it — or at the very least, appreciate it."
That's why Garg cooked up BACON (Biology And Chemistry Online Notes), a set of fun and engaging online tutorials that make connections between organic chemistry and such topics as sports, health, genetics and even popular television shows. Garg's students have been eating it up, and now science educators around are using the tutorials to inspire their students as well.
"BACON makes organic chemistry less intimidating and really helps students learn chemical reactions and retain the knowledge ... while keeping the stress level down, said Michael Bailey, Jr., a UCLA senior and pre-medicine major. "The BACON tutorials completely changed my view of organic chemistry. I laughed, I cried, I learned."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @01:01AM
I slogged through two semesters of OC to get barely passing grades. It just seemed like mountains of memorization, from the compound names that could be traditional, systematic or completely unrelated, to justifying why reactions didn't complete as intended (the stars/molecules weren't aligned properly...). Practical experiments had to be done in a lab on shitty dirty glassware. I even took PC to see whether it was just organic I couldn't grok, but while it was more interesting, my math didn't match because I had not taken a class in differential equations.
I moved to CS and it was the best thing I did, should have done that from the start, but I didn't know CS was going to be so hot when I graduated. I don't think chem majors are doing so well.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 22 2016, @01:22AM
That's the part that pissed me off about having to memorize all the ions' names in gen chem - the conventions weren't consistent. For Anions you have -ates that are charges -1 and -2 depending on the elements, or an -ate and an -ite for different elements that are both -1. For cations one element's -ous and -ic are +1 and +2; for another element it's -ous and -ic are +2 and +3. And for the sake of tradition and making sense of the madness, our (admittedly competent) professor mandated that we memorize them all. Fuck that. Damn shame, too, because they started doing hydrocarbons right before I dropped.
Before I took that crap I came from electronics, which is much more consistent in its rules.