1. Review the tutorial material and do the Exercises.
2. We would appreciate comments on the tutorial material and its potential use in teaching.
3. Direct your attention to the Resource section of this site.
4. We would appreciate comments on this material, as well as additional material that you think would be appropriate (in particular, any papers of your own on this subject). Please contact W. R. Smith.

It may be convenient to download the entire tutorial file (in Adobe .pdf format) and at your convenience, work through the steps that do not require use of the Java applet; then come back to the site to use the applet. An item part-way down the tutorial menu bar allows you to do download this file. Also, be sure to read the page outlining the Technical Requirements for Using this Site.

Some Personal Thoughts on the Pedagogy of Chemical Reaction Stoichiometry (CRS):

1. We believe that CRS should be studied in its own right, "uncontaminated" by any implications arising from reaction networks, mechanisms, and pathways, or from reaction equilibrium. This is in order to understand the foundations of CRS so that it may play a role as a servant to these other matters, which transcend CRS.
   
   
2. We believe that, in the pedagogy of chemistry, there is an over-emphasis on systems that can be represented by a single chemical equation (R=1, corresponding to a single chemical reaction) in the context of "balancing a given reaction" using additional artifices and "tricks." Important as this case is, if the pedagogy does not go beyond this stage, even in elementary teaching, the danger exists of creating uncertainty (or confusion or ignorance) in the mind of a student as to the greater role of CRS in chemistry, and how to identify and treat systems for which more than one equation is required. In the exercises in this tutorial, we give examples of this "confusion" as it exists in the literature.
   
   
3. We believe that, even for the case R=1, the artifices and tricks can be quite involved, as evidenced by the large number of papers published on this subject (most of which are along the lines of "my trick is better than yours"). We believe that there are two drawbacks to these approaches: (1) the complex approach required for some problems can lead to an overemphasis on the artifices and tricks themselves, rather than on the underlying chemistry; (2) this approach is inherently incapable of establishing the correct value of R. We believe that all of these artifices are unnecessary in CRS.
   
   
4. We believe that it is desirable to develop the pedagogy of CRS based on simple concepts with which the student is already familiar: (1) atomic and charge conservation; (2) molecular formulas; and (3) methods for solving linear algebraic equations. The MRM ("Matrix Reduction Method" described in the tutorial uses only these concepts.

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