RACI Congress

[GFirmer]

Raising the next generation of chemists - are Australian chemistry courses up to the task?

Please leave any questions or comments you had about my presentation below and I will answer them :)

[CathyHay]

Have you considered looking into the curriculum of other associated units such as physics as from my personal experience I felt that solar cells and other sections you mentioned were covered in these courses?

[GFirmer]

Hi Cathy! That's a great question - thanks for reaching out. I am hoping to refine my methodology to a point that it can be easily applied across all senior science courses, but unfortunately I don't have time in my project to be doing all of that analysis myself - there is a lot of data!

You're right that some aspects of the science I presented today are present in some of the other courses - like physics and earth sciences, but they are not presented in those courses from a chemistry perspective - for example, discussions about the chemistry of photovoltaic materials will not be present in other science courses - so students are not leaving school realising that chemistry can have an impact on those fields, and I think that's a real shame! I guess this is one of the issues when we 'silo' the sciences into different fields and making students pick.