Welcome to Star Chemistry! A unique feature of the Biochemistry Literacy vision is to give students a perspective on the origins of the elements that make up life. This course, which took me years to research and develop, covers essential high school content, like the mole, molecular weight, isotopes, and radioactivity. But those concepts, which in normal chemistry curricula some of the most tedious to learn, really come to life here, and set the stage for one of the most dazzling and unexpected realizations, that we are “star stuff”. The second half of this unit is the payoff, and covers the stellar fusion processes that create all the elements of the universe. This unit has been extremely popular in the Zoom classes, and now it’s available in a beautifully polished form, for everyone. With this unit,  students will be prepared to tackle the math involving moles in high school chemistry, as well as learn the unexpected connection between biochemistry and the stars, that you will absolutely not find anywhere else.

Who should learn this? This course can stand alone, and I believe is appropriate down to young age groups. There is some light math like finding a weighted average, decimals, and plugging in numbers to one formula, but most of the course simply requires adding or subtracting 1 or 2 from a number. I truly believe everyone can (and should) learn the content here. Check out the sample video introducing moles to see if it’s accessible to your student. Biochem 2.0 Unit 3 can be done as a stand-alone course for beginners. It is more meaningful if you complete Biochem 2.0 Unit 1, but it’s not at all required. Biochem 2.0 Unit 2 (unpublished) is of course is not available yet, but I wanted to get this star chemistry course out first, as I was ready to record the videos, and provides a second entryway into the program. It also does not require a model kit.

Soft Launch: As of August 3, around half of the videos (and the workbook) are available. By the end of August, all the videos will be complete, but I wanted to make this unit active, so that people could start to check them out. This is truly one of the most amazing learning sequences I could imagine, so I really hope that everyone can learn form it.