Leslie Atkins Elliott recently published an article co-authored by two undergraduate students – Lizzie Sippola and Jeffrey Watkins – from her research methods course. The article, “Modeling Chemical Reactions with the Gaussian Gun,” appeared in the December issue of the Journal of Chemical Education.
In the article, Atkins and her co-authors describe how the gaussian gun, a simple configuration of magnets and ball bearings, can be leveraged to connect ideas from physics to representations and ideas that are central to chemistry and challenging for students to learn.