Spicing up An Engineer's Education: Towards Chemical Common Sense

Chemistry classes for (non-chemical) engineers tend to be theoretical, doing little to teach the "look and feel" of chemistry. A new edition of a "Chemistry for engineers" class has started to expose the students to cinnamic aldehyde, smelling of cinnamon, or vanilline, smelling of vanilla. From their molecular structure, the properties of these substances, like color or melting point, are deduced. In every one of twelve lectures, a host of such qualitative (or even quantitative) structure-property relationships is explored. Selected chemical substances are passed around to make the engineering students acquainted with the chemists' approach to chemicals: visual inspection, smelling, testing reactivities. The attitude of the students with respect to this new, strongly chemicals-based chemistry class is assessed. It appears that the typical "molecular approach" of chemists is better understood and acknowledged.