High School Chemistry Activities with an Environmental Concern: Cost-Effective Colorimetric Ion Analysis

摘要

Teaching high school chemistry is a difficult task in developing countries. The materials in laboratories should be cheap and accessible. Moreover, waste recovering systems do not exist in most of these countries. Therefore, it is imperative to instill in students the habit as well as the need to feel responsible for what waste their activities will produce. In this manuscript we explain a method to determine the presence of Fe²⁺ and Cu²⁺ ions in unknown solutions with cheap equipment. This can be used to illustrate the Beer–Lambert law and also emphasizes environment protection. Each experiment takes 2 hours of a group.