Toward the Greening of Our Minds: A New Special Topics Course

Nowadays environmentally friendly scientists are conscious about the need to make chemistry "greener". The success of green chemistry depends on the training of the students of today. Facing the need to open students' minds on the greener side of chemistry, a new special-topics course has been developed that covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of green chemistry. The main goal of this course is to motivate the students to use their critical-thinking and problem-solving ability in learning about green chemistry. The originality of this course arises from the unique combination of using diverse pedagogical tools to teach a new chemistry topic as well as the active-learning approach engaging the students in the course material. The course goals, instructional materials, format of the course, grading, evaluation, conclusions of the course are detailed in this article and corresponding Supplemental Material. This outline is designed to provide a model to instructors wishing to integrate a green chemistry course in their curriculum.