These exercises involve much the same kind of thinking that would be needed to deal with research problems in microwave spectroscopy. A similar observation applies to SIRS, which offer many opportunities for making even very large lecture sections much more interactive. Simulated data for topics such as titration, kinetics, equilibrium, gas laws, and many others make it possible to ask students questions in a much more realistic context than is possible in most lecture classes. With SIRs one can forget about problems of drawing adequate representations of experimental setups or industrial processes on a chalkboard. One can go beyond equations and formulas by generating simulated data, but one need not calculate single data sets for analysis and then control the analysis from the front of the room.
Students can suggest changes in parameters and the entire class can see results almost immediately.
SIRs can be combined with demonstrations so that a much broader range of experimental conditions can be explored by teacher and students together. SIRs also include animations of many nanoscale processes, which provides a view of the models chemists use to interpret macroscale observations. As with the macroscale simulations, material such as atomic orbitals and entropy as probability can be presented dynamically, without any need for a teacher to be an artist. Developed and popularized by Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University, ConcepTests are brief questions that are presented to a large lecture class. Each question is designed to find out whether each student in the class has a working understanding of a concept that has just been presented.