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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

> The laboratory work of introductory chemistry is closer to a cookbook than an experiment. Students are given incredibly precise instructions and told to find a certain result. If they fail to find the result, they are made to redo the “experiment”.

This absolutely resonates with me. I am re-learning chemistry now, and this sticks out to me as something that frustrated me as a student. The amount of time that it took to get the experiment right sapped away all my curiosity for what I was actually doing. It's worth mentioning that part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me. I think it teaches people to be good lab techs, but not good scientists.

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> part of the purpose of the labs is to teach lab techniques. But the cost seems really high to me.

That cost is potentially about to change, with AR/VR-based virtual labs.

Sword combat is something that requires a lifetime of dedicated hard training, with associated injuries... or is something grandma can pick up in a few minutes and do to music. With simulation, realism can be throttled to meet user and class objectives and constraints. Exposure to real-world Murphy messiness is of course still a learning objective. But fighting it need not be quite so pervasive and costly a tax on knowledge acquisition. Especially where "the biggest payoff is having seen it/done it once" is sufficient to need. Also, challenges like getting "incorrect" results, experiment debugging, record keeping, and ethics, can be more systematically taught.

And with lab tech becoming increasingly automated...

Setting aside the semantics about what constitutes an 'experiment', constant failure due to minutiea you didn't consider in your technique is what actual science looks like. It is deeply frustrating, but it's the nature of the beast. And it's how you learn, and become a better scientist.

It's the difference between writing pseudocode that vaguely looks like it does what you want, and having an actual, executable program that works as intended. The devil's in the details.

I'm not sure you can have one without the other.

That's true, but I think the point is that we're stifling exploration. I was trying to come up with an example challenge that would have been the right kind of experiment for me. The one that came to mind is as follows:

$10 (pick any amount) of gold is dissolved in a glass is front of the student. If they can get it back, the gold is theirs.

You can provide varying amounts of information to make the task easier or harder. Grades depend on creativity, effort, and communication.

So, the 'cooler' experiments are also more dangerous, and your example is illustrative of that. I'd be hesitant to hand students a flask of aqua regia (the only acid that can dissolve gold) and tell them to go nuts.

Ignoring the obvious safety issue of every student having an effervescent, volatile strong acid solution (which is tricky to handle safely even as an experienced chemist), there are a handful of incompatible chemical combinations with aqua regia that would require an immediate lab evacuation and call to the fire department. You'd need constraints and some serious vetting of the students' plans before you could let them touch the stuff.

I like the idea of open-ended experiments, but technique is so crucial to these things that even if they're right in theory, in practice they'd often get a negative result because of technical shortcomings of their technique. This is why you end up with cookbook experiments

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