ChemMatters CD-ROM Inspire article
ChemMatters is an award-winning magazine published quarterly by the American Chemical Society for secondary-school students.
Each issue is full of readable articles about the chemistry used in everyday life, and is of interest to budding chemists and their teachers alike. The ChemMatters CD-ROM (version 3.0) contains two decades of the magazine from February 1983 (volume 1, number 1) to December 2003 (volume 21, number 4).
This archive of more than 300 articles is a useful resource for students, whether they are working on specific projects or undertaking general research. All the material is suitable for school students studying pre-university chemistry and much of it would be accessible to bright 15-year-olds.
For teachers, it is a great source of background information for enlivening lessons with snippets of information that hook students. Whether your students want to know the chemistry involved in measuring ground-level ozone (September 2001 issue) or what the atmospheres on other planets in our Solar System are like (October 2003 issue), then this is the right resource for you.
Users can search the whole CD-ROM for keywords in articles, or browse the magazine issues one page at a time. The articles are in Adobe PDF format and can be printed easily.
The American Chemical Society websitew1 includes a free archive of samples from more recent magazine issues (February 2003 to December 2006), plus a full archive of the teachers’ guides. These magazine supplements contain additional information, comprehension questions, laboratory activities related to articles, and other activities such as instructions for building a methane ice model out of card (October 1995 issue).
Ordering
The ChemMatters CD-ROM costs US$25 for a single user or US$99 for a single school site licence, which allows all the information to be shared across a school or library network. It can be purchased online from www.acs.org/chemmatters