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Craig Campbell

@craigdcampbell.bsky.social
150 followers 52 following 18 posts

Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at Oxford. Lover of practical science, curly arrows, puns, vibrato and Scotland's greatest invention, the deep-fried battered Snickers (with chips) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #ChemSky #ChemEd #OrgChem

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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Malcolm Stewart @malcolmstewart.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
How can group work and experimental design better engage 1st year undergraduates in analytical chemistry labs? Our approach is out now in the J.Chem. Ed! #ChemEd #Oracy pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... @jamiewilmore.bsky.social @charlottehancox.bsky.social @craigdcampbell.bsky.social
pubs.acs.org
Introducing Group-Based Experimental Design to UK First-Year Undergraduates: An Investigation of Solvent Polarity
Motivated by low student engagement in a traditional expository solvatochromism first-year undergraduate practical, and preuniversity student misconceptions around solvation, we have developed an acce...
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Malcolm Stewart @malcolmstewart.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
@craigdcampbell.bsky.social and I have a new paper out that’s only taken about 4 years to get there! Thanks to all the co authors for their valuable input into making this the paper it is! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
tandfonline.com
Development of three Higher Education professional learning networks in response to COVID-19: a case study
The COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic brought in-person teaching to an abrupt halt in March 2020 posing the problem of how to continue to deliver undergraduate courses remotely. This paper presents a ...
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Y4s also require significant supervision, and all of this will be pushed onto research groups. Regardless of pursuit of Chemistry research afterwards or not, the transferable skills from the lab experience are what we're all really after, regardless of institution.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
...without significant lab time, repeated exposure, building familiarity/confidence and complexity gradually. Reducing lab experience further jeopardises the performance level of final year students significantly, as I have seen from supervising project students at the end of Y1, Y2 and Y3.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
What I would say is that lab teaching needs to be carefully crafted to maximise the student experience to ensure value for money. However, it also needs to give students the time to think, to explore, work problems out, perform complex operations safely and proficiently. You can't do all that...
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
It's a great point for discussion with students about potential issues with the algorithm (massively overshooting if you are near a stationary point, and you may find a different minimum from the one you are closest to)
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
The slight issue with that description is it doesn't find the minimum quickly if you're a long way away from the lowest point. So instead, you move slightly from your first point if you're on a steep slope, and a longer way if the slope is shallow.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
But it becomes a good discussion point with students - can they see any potential issue with that sort of algorithm? (Multiple minima, and being near stationary points means you end up moving very far away from your initial guess)
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Unfortunately, CoPilot was hopeless. I spent hours refining my query and correcting its output suggestions and I just gave up. Gemini couldn't solve my problem either, and I'm a big fan of Gemini!
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
When you get to the point at the bottom, everywhere you look is on an uphill slope, so you must be at the bottom. This is the (local) lowest energy state.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Haha yes. It you have a graph and you want to find the lowest point, what do you do? Well, you look at your local environment, and if you seem to be on a downhill slope, it's likely moving a bit further will keep going downhill. So, move down the hill a bit, and then repeat reassessment.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Interestingly, I was trying to do the data analysis for Theo's VICEPHEC poster in Excel, but found it quite challenging to get the data analysed. I was going to turn to Python, but I was curious to see if CoPilot would be able to solve my problem in Excel...
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
My approach to this work was to relate minimisation algorithms to things I did at school, and Newton-Raphson and numerical analysis seemed like a good tie-in.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
It doesn't have to be Excel, but the logic behind coding, data organisation, commands - skills that are used in algebraic manipulation - these are the maths skills I think everyone should have, if not in chemistry specifically
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Malcolm Stewart @malcolmstewart.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
What an amazing #ViCEPHEC25 conference organised by @cate-cx.bsky.social and team. My team even won a poster prize @craigdcampbell.bsky.social
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Altmetric @altmetric.com · 18/11/2024
We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics
docs.bsky.app
Action Intent Links | Bluesky
Authors, websites, and apps can use action intent links to implement "Share on Bluesky" buttons, or similar in-app actions. Logged-in users will be directed to the corresponding action view in the Blu...
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
David K Smith @professor-dave.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Just finished teaching my introductory course on Organic Reaction Mechanisms to our Year 1 chemistry undergraduates. I wrote this paper to share the unique approach, in which we develop some simple rules so students can predict mechanisms rather than just learn them. pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
pubs.acs.org
Priority and Selectivity Rules To Help Students Predict Organic Reaction Mechanisms
Organic reaction mechanisms lie at the heart of developing an understanding of how the molecular world functions. However, many students simply try to memorize mechanisms, or use their knowledge of th...
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Has Jackie Weaver moved Handforth Parish Council over yet?
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
So, after adding over 50 g of PhBr and thinking it was reacting smoothly and only slightly exothermically, I got a shock when it suddenly turned black and started foaming spectacularly, shooting all the way up - and out - the condenser. A black mini-fountain of Mg, benzene and PhMgBr.
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
I needed to make a large batch of phenylmagnesium bromide, which needed over 100 g of bromobenzene. I'd made the Grignard reagent a reasonable number of times on scales up to 30 g, so thought this would be fine. This time, what I thought was reaction initiation wasn't though...
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Claire Murray @drclairemurray.com · 15/11/2024
Calling #ChemSky, activation time is now! ⚗️🧪 My old Chemistry department at the University of Reading is being forced to close (*). There are lots of students worried about the validity of their degrees and lots of staff worried about their jobs. Please sign! www.change.org/p/stop-unive...
change.org
Sign the Petition
Stop University of Reading from closing the Department of Chemistry
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
A lovely 3D model to show E2 elimination of a bicyclic ring system - so satisfying to examine the structure!
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Craig Campbell @craigdcampbell.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
I am one of those 1,000,000+ new additions to Bluesky! - Looking forward to it expanding ever further so I can casually browse the latest chemistry developments, practically and in chemical education research!
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Reposted by Craig Campbell
Bluesky @bsky.app · 16/11/2024
Another day, another million new people have joined Bluesky! 18M users? 🙂‍↔️ 18M friends 🙂‍↕️
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