It all started out as a study in problem-based learning – but the enthusiasm from the students motivated the team of researchers to continue developing a compact spectrophotometer using inexpensive materials. The work has now been published in the Journal of Chemical Education.
“Science is more interesting if it is related to our everyday life and is easily accessible. Our new spectrometer, therefore, consists of inexpensive components and minimal theory. It encourages students’ curiosity to solve problems and understand how a spectrometer works,” says Jens Uhlig, NanoLund education coordinator and chemistry researcher at Lund University.
In commercial spectrophotometers the majority of optical elements are hidden “under the hood”.
Investigating the optical properties of various chemical compounds using UV-vis spectrophotometers is an essential part of education in chemistry. In commercial spectrophotometers the majority of optical elements are hidden “under the hood”, which limits the understanding of the mechanisms behind the generation of spectral curves.
This may in turn impede the ability to understand the limitations of the applied method and, in some cases, the interpretation of the acquired data. In addition, the study of optical emission phenomena using fluorescence spectrophotometers is seldom implemented in educational laboratories due to the practical challenges and costs of the devices, which severely limit pedagogic access to this topic.
Making students more confident
For students to be more confident with these two basic spectroscopy techniques, the researchers have developed a laboratory kit that provides a multifaceted learning experience. Starting with a basic exploration of an instrument assembly, it teaches, for example, technical concepts as spectral resolution and detection sensitivity. More fundamentally, it enables deeper learning of the Beer-Lambert law and the notion of Stokes shift.
The spectrophotometer is built from cost-efficient materials and is easily scalable, making it affordable for many educational laboratories. Due to a modular design, it is adaptable to various levels of education and has been successfully applied during high school-, undergraduate-, and graduate-level classes.
- Read an interview on the Viking spectrophotometer with Jens Uhlig (in Swedish)
- “Viking Spectrophotometer: A Home-Built, Simple, and Cost-Efficient Absorption and Fluorescence Spectrophotometer for Education in Chemistry”