Abstract:

At the Faculty of Chemistry UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) students of the last semester are aware of the problems we are facing at the city, mainly air pollution.

The best way to make them proactive in the learning process, is to let them solve practical problems, teaching them how to find the information, in that way they will be able to find practical solutions to the problems.

Mexico City is in a valley at 2200 m and surrounded by mountains in the east, west and south. In the north, there are valleys but a large density of population is present in that area. Actually, there are around 24 million people in the metropolitan area. With more than four millions cars, if each car consumes on average 10 liters of gasoline the daily consumption es 40,000,000 millions of liters per day. Because the orography of the valley the main winds are from the north, this produce an accumulation of the pollutants in the city because the mountains are sorounding the valley.

All the cars that circulate in the Valley of Mexico must have a certificate of low pollution, this is done every semester. Nevertheless, even with this restriction, several days during the year, mainly during the winter and spring, the pollution is very high in the Valley of Mexico (more than 200ppm of Ozone). New regulations are underway by the government in restriction of circulation. However, no original way of solving the problem has been addressed.

This problem was presented to the students, and it was given to them the task of finding different alternatives for reducing pollution, not following the simplistic alternative that the government has taken, reducing circulation.

After brain storm with the students, several solutions came across.

The first step was to identified the source of the pollution and finding what was the real problem.

Problem; the increase of Ozone at a ground level for the lack of winds and high sun light, with Ozone precursors present.

From the chemical point of view they found several alternatives immediate. Ozone is a very reactive molecule, tend to react very fast with compound with double bonds.

Most of the plants and trees produce a large amount of natural products, many of them are insaturated compounds, and they are volatile (having a double bond, they can react with the Ozone and eliminate it). Also the plants can absorve in their leaves the Ozone.

In order to solve the problem of increase Ozone level, was to find is there is a practical solution to increase the amount of volatile compounds in the atmosphere using trees and plants to produce them, and react with the Ozone.

In a literature search of similar problems, they found several key articles; that the pollution problem has been solved in different countries using a reforestation process. In that way by a natural process, the amount of Ozone is reduced dramatically.

Teaching student how to solve practical problems of everyday life is the best way of incentivate them for a better understanding of the topic they are learning. The self-satisfaction of contributing with a positive answer to a real problem is very rewarding. The most important contribution of the course, is to teach students how to find the right information for solving a particular problem using the proper informatics tools.

Keywords:

Chemistry, new skills, pollution, informatic.