Polymers: A Guided Inquiry December 2024
Current version (c) 2024 Jennifer Laaser
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
The current source for these materials is accessible on Github: https://github.com/jlaaser/pogil-polymers
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Polymers: A Guided Inquiry is intended for use in upper-level undergraduate or introductory graduate-level courses in polymer science. These activities currently most closely track the presentation of material in Polymer Chemistry, 2nd Ed., by Paul C. Hiemenz and Timothy P. Lodge, but can easily be adapted for use with other textbooks.
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This collection is a work in progress, and not all exercises have yet been evaluated in classroom use. A summary of the current revision status of each activity is included in the Release Notes, below.
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Every effort will be made to correct outstanding errors in these materials as they are found. However, if you find an issue that needs to be fixed, please create an issue in the GitHub issue tracker for this project: https://github.com/jlaaser/pogil-polymers/issues
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Contributions are welcome! If you have an idea for a new exercise or want to improve an existing one, please post your suggestion in the issue tracker (above) or send me an email (below) so that we can coordinate.
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The exercises are written LaTeX and can be compiled using pdflatex via the command line or your favorite TeX IDE. If you are new to LaTeX, Texmaker (http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/ ) is a relatively user-friendly platform to start with.
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The main file is pogil-polymers.tex:
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To compile the complete set of exercises, simply compile pogil-polymers.tex without any changes.
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To compile a subset of the exercises, comment out (put a % sign in front of) the "\include" statements for any exercises that you want to omit from the output before compiling the pdf. You can also re-order the exercises, chapters, and sections by changing the order of the "\include" and "\chapter" commands in the document.
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This project also contains a template for a single exercise, called "single-exercise.tex":
- To compile a single exercise, put the path to the exercise you want to compile into the "\include" statement in "single-exercise.tex" and run LaTeX.
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By default, the activities compile as printable handouts that are ready to give to students. To instead compile the instructor guide (which includes both solutions and implementation notes for each activity), change the \documentclass line to:
- \documentclass[instructor,handout]{pogil} % use this version to compile a single activity in single-exercise.tex
- \documentclass[instructor,book]{pogil} % use this version to compile the full set of activities, in pogil-polymers.tex
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Compiled PDFs of the full set of exercises will be uploaded with each official release; see https://github.com/jlaaser/pogil-polymers/releases
Questions? Interested in contributing? You can reach the author at:
E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://laaserlab.chem.pitt.edu/ Github: github.com/jlaaser
Unreleased - December 18, 2024
The following activities are complete (including the instructor guides), and have been classroom-tested and revised:
Activity 1.1 - From Molecules to Polymers
Activity 1.2 - With Increasing Size Comes Increasing Complexity
Activity 1.3 - Polymer Nomenclature
Activity 1.4 - Molecular Weight and Dispersity
Activity 1.5 - Measuring Molecular Weight
Activity 2.1 - Introduction to Polymerization Mechanisms
Activity 3.1 - Chemistries of Step-Growth Polymerizations
Activity 3.2 - Degree of Polymerization in Step-Growth Polymerizations
Extension 3.2a - Synthesis of Polymer Networks by Step-Growth Reactions
Activity 3.3 - Equilibrium in Condensation Polymerizations
Activity 3.4 - Molecular Weight Distributions in Step-Growth Polymerizations
Activity 3.5 - Kinetics of Step-Growth Polymerizations
Activity 4.1 - Chemistry of Free-Radical Polymerization
Activity 4.2 - Kinetics of Free-Radical Polymerization
Activity 4.3 - Thermodynamics of Free-Radical Polymerization
Activity 5.2 - Atom Transfer Radical Polymerization
Activity 5.3 - Anionic Polymerization
Activity 5.4 - Ring-Opening Polymerizations
Activity 6.1 - Copolymerization
Activity 7.1 - Models for Ideal Polymer Chains
Activity 7.2 - Elasticity of Polymer Chains
Extension 7.2a - Elasticity of Real Chains
Activity 8.1 - Elasticity of Polymer Networks
Activity 8.2 - Viscoelasticity of Polymeric Materials
Extension 8.2a - Small-Amplitude Oscillatory Shear Rheology
Activity 9.1 - Regular Solutions & Flory-Huggins Theory
Activity 9.2 - Thermodynamics of Phase Separation
Activity 9.3 - Phase Diagrams of Polymer Solutions
Activity 10.1 - Fundamentals of Scattering
Activity 10.2 - Static and Dynamic Light Scattering
Activity 11.1 - The Glass Transition
Activity 11.2 - Measuring Tg and Tm
The following activites are complete (including the instructor guide), but have not been classroom-tested (or, have been classroom-tested but have not yet been updated following testing):
Activity 5.1 - Ideal, Living Polymerizations (note: Model 1 has been classroom tested, but Model 2 has not)
The following activities are included as ``working drafts'' which contain complete student handouts but no or incomplete instructor guides, and have not been classroom-tested (or, have been classroom-tested but have not yet been updated following testing):
n/a - none in this release
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (DMR-POL 1846665). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.