Teaching & Learning goals
The teaching and learning goals of this unit are either conceptual or skills-based as follows:
Scientific concepts:
Ability to understand:
- Chemical structures of chitin and chitosan and its properties;
- Chitosan's possible reactions in the human body;
- Applications of chitosan in different areas (biochemistry/medicine, cleaning water, preparing fruit juice ...) ;
- Explanations based on the substances' structures and properties.
Skills:
Ability to:
- Formulate an inquiry question and a hypothesis;
- Plan and perform an investigation (experiment);
- Communicate and present ideas and results;
- Manage information and knowledge;
- Identify, evaluate and use information from the internet and other sources;
- Use digital mind mapping to support one's performance;
- Communicate with partners from industry;
- Make own decisions based on scientific knowledge and personal values
Pre-Requirement Knowledge:
This unit is more effect if the students have the following prior knowledge:
Contents:
The students had been taught a sequence on carbon hydrates and learned about cellulose as a poly-saccharide, in particular:
- Properties of glucose, composition and structure of the glucose molecule
- Some mono-saccharides and its appearance in nature
- Glycosidic bonding
- Starch and cellulose as polymeric compounds
Skills:
The students are familiar with conducting experiments on their own. They can operate computers, and are to some extend able to research information. Since the focus should be very much on the improvement of competencies like information management, communication, evaluation and decision making, a well-planned support by the teacher is needed. Particularly in traditional German classrooms the focus had been on learning facts and concepts, while the promotion of the mentioned competencies had been neglected. This is to be changed since the new education standards have been introduced in 2004, where explicit foci are laid on four areas of competencies: discipline knowledge, nature of science, communication and evaluation.