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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
As part of a pilot project on improving the accessibility of university courses to students with reading disorders (in particular dyslexia), 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. Therefore, I created a variant of DejaVu (itself an unicode expansion of Bitstream Vera) with a very strong focus on legibility (at the cost of aesthetic beauty).
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.
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
- Yes, DejaVu HL is ugly and takes some getting used to. As mentioned, aesthetic beauty was not a design priority. If you're looking for a freely available font that has a fairly good legibility but also looks good, variants of the Lucida typeface (such as Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Sans) are available on most popular operating systems. In addition, Google hosts some nice freely downloadable fonts, like Cabin and Lato. I don't know about unicode support, though.
- DejaVu HL is very much "work in progress". Serifs are not consistently applied to ligatures, some of the (glyphs with) diacritics are possibly broken, the widths of some characters may still be subject to improvement, and most importantly, it hasn't been rigorously tested for use by dyslectics; it might even do more harm than good (though I do have anecdotal evidence to the contrary).
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 Sunday, the 16th of January 2022
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