Institute for Chemical Education Ready for Startup.

Two years ago, the Institute for Chemical Education—ICE for short—was nothing but a gleam in a chemistry professor's eye. Now it has a letterhead, a national board, a cadre, some money, the promise of more money, and firm plans to begin formal operations this summer. Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is coordinator of that school's general chemistry program. He is an enthusiastic promoter of chemical education activities and a firm believer in a hands-on, experimentation-based "discovery approach" to teaching chemistry. In 1982, at the 7th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, the UW chemist proposed to establish a multimillion-dollar endowed institute that would, with the cooperation of academic and industrial chemists, "revitalize the teaching of the chemical sciences at all educational levels." When Shakhashiri revealed that ambitious proposal, he also revealed a good sense of timing. The U.S. was then agonizing over a "crisis" in precollege scie...