Rearranging equations
Tips for teaching maths skills to our future chemists, by Paul Yates of Keele University
This is a fundamental skill required by chemistry students, principally in order to calculate the values of specified properties. As we will see, this is straightforward, but a number of obstacles do exist before students can feel confident in doing this. For example:
- they may have previously avoided using formal algebraic methods. For example, the equation x + 5 = 12 can be solved by trial and error;
- they may feel uncomfortable using the formal rules. We will see that the rules are easily derived, and don't have to be remembered;
- even though the rules are simple, the presence of more complicated functions (such as logarithms or powers) may mask this simplicity;
- they may rely on remembering specific types of problems. There is potentially an infinite number of ways in which an expression may need to be rearranged.
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