At the recent American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting in Boston, I spent an evening on the exhibit show floor. Walking the floor at an ACS meeting always leaves me a little bit wanting, as my current stage in life and employment does not require the purchase of cutting-edge instrumentation, specialty glassware, or textbooks. However, toward the end of the evening, I ran into Gordon Bain. We were both previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he as director of the general chemistry labs, I during the Madison portion of my time with the Journal of Chemical Education. Gordon now works for ThermoFisher Scientific, and at their booth, he showed me the next generation of the “Spec 20″, which I remembered from my undergraduate days in the chemistry laboratory. As he pointed out the features of the “Spec 200″, which he knew intimately as head of the design team for the instrument, I was struck by the number of design features that were related to his knowledge of how the instrument was typically used (and abused) in the lab by students. His knowledge from inside the experience and its actual use allowed features to be built into the new instrument that took care of previous problems. For example, Gordon brought up the times when students were instructed to “Place the sample in the instrument”, and then poured the liquid sample directly into the instrument, rather than placing the cuvette with its sample into the instrument. The Spec 200 has a solution for that. There was a solution to make it easy to ensure that the instrument would never have to be near running water, but still allowed students to easily prep liquid samples. The design even paid attention to the typical budget constraints of an educator. The instrument has a Spec 20 emulator built into it for teachers who would like to purchase and use one, but cannot replace all of the lab instruments at once, and still need to use the older Spec 20s.

Designing something from the inside out. Isn’t that what chemical education is? Finding out what to teach and how to best design instruction to minimize the misconceptions and the mistakes. And the best way to know it is to study and engage in actual practice—work at it from the inside out.