Student posters on chemistry topics

One of the nice ways of getting students to think about chemistry, especially at introductory levels, is to have them present on something topical that can be related to their core chemistry. This can be useful for chemistry programmes with specific contexts-for example medicinal chemistry, forensic chemistry, etc. Several institutions use the idea of chemistry posters, whereby students prepare a poster on a chemistry topic and present it to their peers and staff either in person or virtually. 

In my experience of doing this, I have found that students either do well in the graphical element of poster preparation or in the inclusion of relevant and appropriate chemistry. To have both in the same poster is less common. In my institution, students are given an initial source of information, and they use this to begin to build up their poster, referring to further sources as required. I feel that this approach helps students, especially at the introductory level, to get a good start on building up the chemistry information on the poster from a reputable source.

To help with this, I prepared a video for my students on how to prepare chemistry posters. These posters differ of course from traditional research posters. They are smaller in size (we use A1), and focus on including relevant aspects of chemistry to explain a topic. But there are lessons that can be learned from this exercise that will be useful to students if they need to prepare research posters in the future. These include thinking of the core message of the presentation, considering a visual rather than text-based medium, and considering the audience of the poster. 

One of the hard jobs for us as educators is to think of poster topics. They need to be topical enough to engage students and have an appropriate theme so that they can relate to their chemistry currently being studied. I find that articles in Education in Chemistry and Chemistry World are great for this. They have some good chemistry at their core, but are of interest and relevance (to have appeared in the magazine in the first place).  I've listed out some of the ones I have compiled below. If you have any more ideas for sourcing titles, please do share in the comments section! For the more recent Education in Chemistry articles, you'll see links to the article online - many thanks to David Sait from EiC for providing these links!