Resumen de A Comprehensive Application To Assist in Acid–Base Titration Self-Learning: An Approach for High School and Undergraduate Students
David González Gómez, Diego Airado Rodríguez, Florentina Cañada Cañada, Jin Su Jeong
Currently, there are a number of educational applications that allow students to reinforce theoretical or numerical concepts through an interactive way. More precisely, in the field of the analytical chemistry, MATLAB has been widely used to write easy-to-implement code, facilitating complex performances and/or tedious calculations. The main objective of this research is to present an ad hoc open MATLAB code toolbox, named AChemTitri, aimed to construct acid–base titration curves in an interactive format. The software has been designed by the means of pop-up windows where students only need to be acquainted with a basic or elementary knowledge of MATLAB. With this application, students will be able to practice with comprehensive titration options such as the titration of strong, weak, or polyfunctional acids and bases and, for each titration, different concentration of each compound as well as the titration volume can be selected. As a result, the software plots the titration curve (pH vs volume) and the first and second derivative of this former curve as well, together with the numerical results. Thus, students will have the opportunity to calculate the final point and pH of the titration graphically and numerically. In addition, concentration diagrams are also displayed (log of the species participating in the titration vs pH); thus, it will be easy to follow how the acid–base titration is progressing. In conclusion, this application is a feasible way to improve the basic concepts of acid–base titration throughout the practice of numerical exercise assisted by computer calculation. The possibility of changing all the chemical parameters and the graphic visualization of results could ease the learning process of students facing the titration concepts for the first time.
