A Modest Change to a Freshman Kinetics Experiment that Reduces Lab Time without Compromising Student Results

We report here a successful adaptation of lab videos used during remote instruction to a kinetics experiment reported in this Journal in 2007. In the in-person lab, students now record their rate data on their cell phone cameras and then collect their data from the videos for their postlab reports; previously, they acquired the data in real time from the spectrophotometer reading and a stopwatch. We have found that increasing the concentration of the bleach, which speeds up the rate faster than data can be directly recorded in real time (1) does not affect the reaction order and (2) decreases lab time.