Play your cards right
Play your cards right
Play your cards right
June 22, 2022
By Jon Hale
Summary
Like many schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, we run a three-year course for science GCSE, but it is a challenging step up for many students from lower school learning.
Early in the course, students need to gain fluency with atomic structure, linking it to the periodic table, isotopes and ions.
Could students show the same metacognitive approaches in learning about ions and ionic bonding?
We distilled this down to include electronic configurations, dot and cross diagrams, covalent line diagrams and the symbolic representations, eg Mg2+. The idea was to provide many different representations of the same species to allow students to correctly identify the ions and develop a deeper understanding of what each representation means.
Eliminate gin - to develop strategy and metacognitive processes as 'played' compounds cannot be played by another student.
It would have been straightforward to solely focus on ions formed from groups I, II, III, VI and VII, but this would have ignored a key aspect of ionic compound formation that students come across at GCSE - acids.
The time investment to consolidate students' understanding of ions and compounds has been worth it.
Reference
Hale, J. (2022, June 22). Play card games to teach electronic configuration and Ionic Compound Formation. Retrieved June 28, 2022, from https://edu.rsc.org/feature/play-card-games-to-teach-electronic-configuration-and-ionic-compound-formation/4015776.article