SCHOOL CHEMICAL EXPERIMENT OPTIMIZATION IN WOLFRAM MATHEMATICA ENVIRONMENT

An experiment is an integral part of natural sciences, especially chemistry. Therefore pupils and students should be in contact with it on regular bases during the process of learning chemistry. However, nowadays a major decrease of use of real chemical experiments is apparent in chemistry education. New or modified known experiments can help to reduce this trend. The proposed method of experiment optimization using Wolfram Research software Mathematica is one of the possible ways how to solve it. This method is based on sequential process of optimization and stochastic extreme value finding for functions of several variables. This problem has been solved at the Department of Chemistry and Chemistry Didactics as a part of a research project entitled “Teacher Profession in Changing Requirements on Education”, executed by Faculty of Education. During the research a program was made that computes optimal values of experiment parameters from measured values. This was verified during teacher training courses at Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Education. This paper presents an example that shows the optimization procedure of a selected chemical reaction.