Teaching Data Acquisition. An Undergraduate Experiment in the Advanced Analytical Chemistry Laboratory

Computers may be the most influential technological development in human society in the last quarter century. Computers are used to control instruments, to acquire and to process data, and to communicate results in meaningful ways. Understanding how to use computers empowers students, freeing them from the "black box" approach to instrument operation. The ability to program, to understand the basic steps involved in the analog-to-digital conversion process, and to grasp how the acquisition process itself affects the outcome of an experiment are important elements in the education of future chemists. For the last few years, we have taught data-acquisition within the framework of three laboratory experiments combined with lectures in the Instrumental Analysis II course. Last year, we changed the software part of the exercise by replacing TurboPascal with Matlab. This powerful programming language integrates analog data acquisition via a toolkit with mathematical-oriented computing and easy visualization. Th...