New Perspectives in Science Education

In 2015 the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to address the big environmental, social and economic challenges of our time, such as preserving oceans and forests, tackling climate change and achieving peace and prosperity for all people. Education for sustainable development is one of the main approaches to promote change in young people’s knowledge, skills and values.

In this contribution, we present a one-week student camp on sustainable electrochemistry, which will take place at the XLAB student laboratory in Göttingen in March 2025. The camp aims at deepening and expanding knowledge acquired at high school, connecting the sustainability goals to curricular core concepts and enabling students to get in touch with current research and researchers.

In order to design a varied and motivating course, we divided it into three sections, in which established chemical reactions are compared to state-of-the-art electrochemical processes. For example, the first two sections oppose the use of elemental bromine to electrochemical bromination [1] and the Fenton experiment to an electro-Fenton reaction [2]. These experiments demonstrate chemical, energetic and environmental advantages of electrochemical in-situ reactions compared to the conventional reactions. In the third section, further experiments cover current research topics such as the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide or nitrate and their conversion into high-value chemical substances [3]. In this part, participants are encouraged to contribute their own ideas and to create new experiments by themselves. This is intended as a means of differentiated instruction and to encourage students to experiment independently.

The participants also learn about modern analytical methods to detect the products of electrochemical reactions which are usually not covered in school, e.g. NMR spectroscopy or cyclic voltammetry.

The goal of the camp is to give students insight into current issues in chemistry research and to illustrate the significance of electrochemistry for a sustainable, efficient and secure chemical industry.