Exploration of Single Compound Phase Diagrams in Chemistry Courses Using MATLab or Octave

Exploration-based class activities have been shown to help students build a deeper connection to the course content and be more engaged than the use of lecture and problem sets alone. High-impact practices that help to build multiple skill sets across disciplines and offer students a chance to exercise agency in their education have been shown to contribute to in depth learning. In this work the coauthors, two students with a background in MATLab and a chemistry instructor, collaboratively developed an interactive activity for students that blends an introduction to programming and computation with physical chemistry content, in this case pure compound phase diagrams. The reported activity helped students to create a better understanding of how computational software such as MATLAb and Octave could aid in visualizing physical phenomena in chemical systems. Literature values of six physical properties of water were used to generate a full phase diagram as an example exercise. The resulting diagram had a maximum error of less than 20% in the calculated output over a range of ten decades (from 1 Pa to 10 GPa). Reflections on the process, educational outcomes and activity from the students are included.