New AACT Resources to Help Teach Chemical Names and Formulas

By Kim Duncan on October 30, 2019


As chemistry teachers around the country plan activities for their students, AACT will highlight resources from our high school resource library that can be used to reinforce topics in different units throughout the school year. Our last post highlighted resources to support a Chemical Bonding unit. We will now focus on a new resource that can be used in a Chemical Names and Formula unit plan.

The activity, Mystery Gang Empirical Formulae can be used to give your students practice determining the empirical and molecular formula of a substance. This resource includes Case description cards, which give the percent composition and description of each substance, and Suspect Cards, which describe each suspect and the formula of the compound they used.

We hope that this activity can help you to reinforce the topic of empirical formulas in a unit about Chemical Names and Formulas. Most of these lessons were made possible by great teachers who shared their own resources. We need your help to keep the collection growing. Do you have a great demonstration, activity, or lesson related to this topic that you would like to share with the community? Please send it along for consideration.