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Courses
As a course director ("titularis")
- General and Inorganic Chemistry: introductory chemistry course for the 1st year Pharmaceutical Sciences in the 1st semester. It consists of 2 modules: "Chemical calculations" and "Physical Chemistry", which are also attended by the 1st year Biomedical Sciences as part of the Biomedical Chemistry course. As a course director, I'm personally teaching the "Physical Chemistry" module, while my colleague Hendrika "Drina" Jaspers is responsible for the "Chemical calculations" module.
- Advanced Chemistry: this second semester course for the 1st year Pharmaceutical Sciences is a collection of somewhat more advanced chemical topics that are of particular interest to future Pharmacy professionals.
As a lecturer ("co-titularis")
- Biomedical Chemistry: the aforementioned "Physical Chemistry" module is also part of the Biomedical Chemistry course for the 1st year Biomedical Sciences, of which Drina Jaspers is course director.
In a more advisory role ("co-titularis")
- General and Inorganic Chemistry Practicals: the "wet labs" associated with the aforementioned General and Inorganic Chemistry course for the 1st year Pharmaceutical Sciences in the 1st semester. Drina Jaspers is course director.
- Organic Chemistry - Theory and Practicals: second semester course for the 1st year Pharmaceutical Sciences that is also part of the Biomedical Chemistry course for the 1st year Biomedical Sciences. Drina Jaspers is course director.
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Miscellaneous educational resources
DejaVu High Legibility ("DejaVu HL") font
DejaVu HL is an ongoing effort to develop a free high-legibility font for science courses. This serves 2 purposes:
- Decreasing student confusion due to lookalike glyphs (e.g. is CH2Cl2 the formula of dichloromethane or 1,1-diiodoethene?) (Yes, that's a real-life question.)
- Improving comfort for students with reading disorders (in particular dyslexia).
Background: I looked into employing a high-legibility font, but failed to find any freely available options. Furthermore, some of the generally available fonts that are deemed "dyslexic-friendly" have very incomplete unicode support, complicating the use of Greek and mathematical glyphs, which are ubiquitous in science. Therefore, I created a variant of DejaVu (itself an unicode expansion of Bitstream Vera) with a strong focus on legibility.
Installation and usage
- Download all 4 ttf font files here and save them where your word processor can find them. This may or may not require an installation step in some "font manager" program, depending on your choice of operating system and word processor.
- In your word processor, apart form selecting the "DejaVu HL" font, please do left-align your text and use a sufficiently large line spacing (also taking into account line width), else your choice of font may not matter much. See also the British Dyslexia Association's "Dyslexia friendly style guide".
Sample text: creation of DejaVu HL
My primary goal was to obtain a proportional sans serif font, but with serifs on glyphs that would otherwise be poorly distinguishable. Specifically, my starting point was DejaVu Sans, to which I added select glyphs from DejaVu Sans Mono, a monospaced font that is optimized for programming (where confusion between lookalike glyphs can have disastrous consequences) and therefore already contained the desired serifs on glyphs that might otherwise be ambiguous. The laborious part consisted of tweaking the shapes and character spacing of the imported monospaced glyphs, as to make them look less foreign in a proportional font.
Disclaimers
- DejaVu HL is very much "work in progress". Serifs are not consistently applied to ligatures, some of the (glyphs with) diacritics are possibly broken and the widths of some characters may still be subject to improvement.
- DejaVu HL takes some getting used to! I myself use it as the default font in my web browser and mail reader since 2019; it bothered me during the first month or so, but now I feel it genuinely helps decrease my cognitive workload when reading. However, it may not be ideal for "PR-like" purposes. Alternatives with a better-than-average legibility but a more conventional look are:
- Trebuchet MS (available free-of-charge as part of Microsoft's "Core fonts for the Web" pack);
- variants of the Lucida typeface (such as Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Sans), available on most popular operating systems;
- Cabin, Lato and possibly other fonts available free-of-charge from Google.
Beware: in the specific context of science courses, you may run into shortcomings in unicode support somewhere down the line. I can't vouch for the 3rd party fonts listed above in that respect, but generally spoken, when evaluating a font, make sure it supports all the (Greek and math) symbols you will ever need. Else you may find yourself forced to mix fonts, which is not only a source of (compatibility and other) headaches, but arguably defeats the purpose of carefully selecting a font!
License
DejaVu HL is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
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Interactive 2D van der Waals gas simulation
Introduction
To the right of this text is an interactive 2D simulation of a van der Waals gas. The following is a "standalone" link that will adapt to different screen sizes (and is therefore more useful for general education purposes): kenno.org/vdwgas_beta
The simulation can be interacted with in the following ways:
- Click/tap on empty space: create 1 atom.
- Drag/swipe from empty space: create multiple atoms.
- Click/tap on an atom: delete that atom.
- Drag/swipe from an atom: drag that atom through the medium. Slowly moving an atom embedded in a chunk of condensed matter can be used to manipulate that chunk. Moving an atom fast can be used to slice a chunk in two, or heat the medium by stirring. Note that the atom has a maximum speed, so it will "chase after" your mouse pointer or finger if the latter moves faster. Also, the medium has a maximum temperature, and atoms are spawned with velocities close to that maximum temperature. Therefore, heating by stirring is only really obvious after the system has been sufficiently cooled. How the latter is accomplished is described in the following bullet point.
- Click/tap and hold an atom: an atom that is held in place will dissipate the kinetic energy/heat it receives from collisions. As such, it may function as a condensation kernel, or to cool down a chunk of condensed matter in which it is embedded.
License
My interactive van der Waals gas simulation is a copyrighted work. It may be displayed free-of-charge for not-for-profit education purposes. I reserve all other rights.
Note: if you have a potential use case that may not be covered by the preceding statement, please do contact me using the "Show e-mail" button next to my picture. I would generally like for this to be used by the community as a tool for teaching (and potentially research). In that light, the current license is merely a placeholder for something more appropriate. What that "something" will be depends on your feedback!
Documentation
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Last updated Tuesday, the 2nd of April 2024
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