Sweet Chemistry – Advanced Course Explores the Chemistry of Carbohydrates at the University of Marburg

Shortly before the end of the first semester, the 12th-grade advanced chemistry class met with their teacher, Dr. Jutta Töhl-Borsdorf, for a workshop at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Marburg on the Lahnbergen. For many of them, it was their first time standing on the large campus—which was covered in snow that morning—and getting a taste of college life.

The goal of the workshop was to provide us with theoretical and practical insight into the chemistry of carbohydrates and to serve as a practical exercise for the three student teachers who led the session. To start things off, an interactive lecture laid the foundation for understanding the following experiments by explaining the general properties and various structures of carbohydrates.
We then split into small groups and headed straight to the stations, where we explored a wide variety of phenomena. These included detection reactions, qualitative analyses, and a self-induced color-changing reaction that could be repeated simply by shaking the solution. What made it special was that nearly everything could be explained using the information from the introduction—which was now our task.

We spent our lunch break in the university cafeteria, which, fortunately, was pretty empty that day, before returning to discuss our experimental results.

At the end, we were divided into small groups again, each with a buzzer. The final activity was a quiz in which we competed against each other and had to demonstrate the knowledge we had gained throughout the day. The winning group was rewarded with candy.

In summary, it was a valuable experience not only in terms of our knowledge of carbohydrates, but above all in terms of how to interpret experimental results and understand the relationships between them.