Abstract:

A university laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific experiments and measurements may be achieved. Usually, in scientific bachelor’s degree at university, students must to perform some laboratory practices to obtain their grade.

However, some science students from first university year do not interest with laboratory work; most of them think experiments have no relationship with theory classes. An example of this situation could be Bioinformatics career; the main objectives of the bachelor's degree in Bioinformatics are to train professionals in research, development and innovation who can manage biomedical and biological data. For some students, chemistry experiments are far away of their interest but they have to perform them.

To transform these bad circumstances, some changes in introducing laboratory practices were provided. So, one week before to lab sessions celebration, students received information about each experiment and they attain some related questions to experiments that they had to answer by email to the university teacher.

Some examples of those questions are: How do you determine a solution protein concentration? How do you calculate the amount of acetylsalicylic acid on a commercial pill (Aspirin)? Could you check the pH of different acids, bases and salts? Could you prepare a protocol for using spectrophotometer? Furthermore, students performed a summarize of each experiment in a lab notebook.

The final evaluation of this activity showed us that students appreciated this proposal and they welcomed these interesting actions, which serve to increase students' chemistry rating and their interest towards lab practices.

Keywords:

Experiments, science, chemistry, university students.