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Do you have a large, bulky spectrophotometer sitting on a shelf or in a cabinet collecting dust? Do you use it for only one or two labs a year?
It’s an expensive, sensitive instrument. Even the cuvettes are expensive and delicate. Ensuring all your students use them for data collection may make you cringe and check your school science department budget balance.
Spectroscopy
There’s a simpler, less expensive, more durable option for student spectrophotometers—the Carolina® Spectroscopy Chamber.Turn your smartphone into a spectrophotometer with the Carolina® Spectroscopy Chamber. Simply slide your smartphone into the chamber. Like its traditional large-apparatus counterpart, the chamber allows light to pass through a test sample in a clear, colorless tube, and a smartphone app analyzes the light with RGB readouts. Carolina provides a free color analyzer app via Google Play and the App Store.Students then convert the collected data to absorbance or transmittance to create calibration curves and subsequent measurement curves for unknowns. To help students understand how a spectrophotometer works, assign “What Goes on Inside a Spectrophotometer” before an investigation.You and your students will be amazed at the quality of data and ease of data collection with the smartphone spectrophotometer. Additionally, the cost is so reasonable that students can now work in pairs instead of waiting in line to use a traditional spectrophotometer.Spectroscopy experiments aren’t just for chemistry students. Any time color hue or color intensity of a solution can be used as an identifier, spectroscopy is a useful lab technique. A useful beginning spectroscopy kit is Carolina ChemKits®: Smartphone Spectroscopy. This kit trains students in spectroscopy and colorimetry techniques by applying Beer-Lambert calibration curves to the dyes in powered drink mixes. Students also get practice making serial dilutions.For life science or environmental science students, take a look at Carrying Capacity and Algal Blooms Kit with Carolina® Spectroscopy Chambers. This series of investigations has students investigate a lake systems model and how the proportion of algal nutrients affects algal growth. Algal growth is quantified using the intensity of green algal pigments, which is based on algal density.Take advantage of the technology at hand and save some money on lab equipment at the same time. The Carolina® Spectroscopy Chamber with the colorimeter app is an engaging and economical way to apply classic investigative techniques in the classroom.
