General On-Line Laboratory Instructions

Welcome to the chemistry On-Line laboratory. This approach to doing laboratory activities involves the use of a published laboratory manual (Safety-Scale Laboratory Experiments for General, Organic and Biochemistry 6^th ed. by S.L. Seager and M.R. Slabaugh) and the laboratory CD that has been prepared to accompany the laboratory manual. Both items are copyrighted and should not be reproduced in any form except as directed in this course or only after obtaining written permission from the copyright owners.

The laboratory CD contains both written pages and photographs of the results obtained when the procedures in the laboratory manual are followed. You should do each assigned experiment as if you were in an actual chemistry laboratory following the procedures given in the manual. This is best accomplished by doing the following in the order given:

1) Read through the entire experiment from the Introduction, through the Calculations-and-Report directions.

2) Complete the Pre-Lab review pages that follow the written material.

3) After you have answered the Pre-Lab review questions, return to the written Experimental Procedure, and carefully read the directions for conducting the experiment.

4) When you come to a step in the procedure that requires you to measure a quantity or make an observation, refer to the Laboratory CD and look at the appropriate photograph from which you can obtain the measurement or observation (See the Computer Instructions sheet for directions).

5) Record the obtained data (numbers from a measurement, observations, etc.) in the correct blank of the appropriate table of the Data-and-Report sheet of the experiment. Some data tables have a blank for an unknown identification (ID) number. You should record your CD number (the number on your CD and CD case) in such blanks.

6) After you have collected all the data for the experiment, refer to the written Calculations-and-Report part of the experiment and carefully read the directions for completing the report part of the experiment. As you do calculations or make interpretations of observations, carefully enter the results in the correct blanks of the appropriate table of the Data-and-Report sheet.

7) After completing the calculations and report section of the experiment, answer all questions at the end of the experiment by circling the letter corresponding to the correct response, and explaining why you chose that response.

8) Submit your experiment reports by following the directions given on the Laboratory-Schedule on your course site.

The successful completion of this laboratory program depends to a large extent on your staying on schedule and following the procedure described above for each experiment. It is very important for you to read the lab manual carefully and try to understand the directions. Take the time necessary to do these experiments correctly, and do not procrastinate. These are not the kind of activities that can be done in a few minutes on a weekend. Good luck.

If you have any problems with an experiment, please do not use e-mail to ask them, but phone me (S. Seager) using the following numbers. However, before you phone, please be sure you have read the lab manual carefully and obtained as much information as possible.  If you get an answering machine, please leave your name, course identification, and carefully stated phone number.  I will return your calls.

Home: 801-479-8934

Computer Instructions

The minimum suggested computer characteristics for this program are: a pentium 133 megahertz processor with a CD ROM drive and 30 megabytes of available hard drive space, with an operating system of Windows 95, 98, 2000 or Me. The program should also work with Windows XP, but it has not been tested.

Part A, Installling the Acrobat Reader: In order to use the on-line laboratory program, your computer must have Adobe Acrobat Reader version 5.0 or higher installed on the hard drive. If your computer does not have this reader installed, the reader can be downloaded from at no cost. However, for your convenience, the Chemistry Advantage lab CD containing the on-line lab materials also contains a copy of the reader that you can install. If you are using a College or University owned computer, do not install the reader without first obtaining appropriate permission. The installation of the reader is accomplished by following steps 1-6 below:

1. Turn on your computer and let it boot. Your normal desktop icons should appear.

2. Put the lab CD into the CD ROM drive.

3. Double click on the "My Computer" icon. A window should appear.

4. Double click on the icon for your CD drive in the window. A new window should appear.

5.  Double click on the icon for the file called: AcroReader51_ENU.exe.  This will start the installation process of the Acrobat Reader on your hard drive.  Be patient, this might take a little time depending on your computer speed.

6.  Installation steps will vary depending on the operating system you are using.  To complete the installation, understand and follow all on-screen instructions that appear.  This might include rebooting of your computer.  If you have questions about the installation, please call one of the numbers listed at the bottom of page 1of these instructions.

Part B, Opening Experiment Files: With the Acrobat Reader installed, you are ready to open the experiment files contained on the lab CD. To open experiment files, follow the steps below:

1.  Double click on the "My Computer" icon.  A window should appear.

2.  Double click on the icon for your CD drive.  A window should appear that contains icons for all the experiments found on the CD.

3.  Double click on the icon for the experiment you want to open.  If an Adobe license agreement appears, read it through, then click on "Accept".  The experiment will open with a printed sheet on the right side of the screen and a bookmark column on the left (See the Figure below).  The printed sheet welcomes you to the experiment, identifies the numbers of the lab manual tables you will use to collect data, and in some cases gives additional information.  It is important that you carefully read the printed pages in each experiment.  The bookmark column contains the experiment number at the top with table numbers below it  and photograph numbers below the table numbers.

4.  To begin collecting data click on the icon to the left of the table you wish to work with.  The icon looks like a sheet of paper with a folded corner (See figure 1-d).  A printed sheet will appear on the right side of the screen.  The sheet contains number designations and descriptions of the photographs that contain data for the table.  In addition, some printed sheets give additional useful information about the photographs and should be read carefully.

5.  To view a photograph, click on the icon to the left of the photograph number (the icon looks like a piece of paper with one corner folded.  The photograph will appear on the right side of the screen (be patient this might take some time depending on the speed of your computer).  To view another photograph, simply click on it's icon and it will replace the current photograph on the right side of the screen.  You may view the printed sheets for tables or the photographs for an experiment in any order and as many times as you wish simply by clicking on the appropriate icon.  It might be necessary to scroll up or down the bookmark column in order to reveal the numbers of all photographs.  To do this, click on the up or down arros to the right of the bookmark column.