LEDs: New Lamps for Old and a Paradigm for Ongoing Curriculum Modernization

Advances in science and technology afford new opportunities for enriching and updating the chemistry curriculum by connecting such developments and their products to core chemical principles. This article illustrates this approach to curriculum modernization using advances in lighting and display technologies with light-emitting diodes (LEDs). As noted in an industry summary, an excellent resource for this topic, LEDs are replacing traditional incandescent sources in many lighting and display technologies for reasons of energy efficiency, safety, and conservation. Their widespread use in vehicle, traffic, display, home, and workplace lighting provides opportunities to directly engage students' interest. The chemistry underpinning LEDs spans many core chemistry curriculum topics, because the semiconductors in the light sources comprise a family of essentially isostructural solids that embrace a variety of periodic trends. Bonding trends exemplified by the solids include electronegativity, atomic radii, bond polarity, isoelectronic principles, and spectroscopic transitions. The solids also provide an acid-base and concentration cell system that complements traditional presentations of aqueous systems. At a more advanced level, the quantum mechanics of spatially confined particles can be presented with this family of solids. This approach to curriculum modernization also affords opportunities to establish interdisciplinary links between chemistry and other scientific and engineering fields.