I have set up this website with two main aims in mind:

1). To help students of UK A-level chemistry courses improve their understanding of the concepts involved.

2). To share my interest of the subject and what I have learned about it over my career.

As far as aim 1) is concerned, I have spent most of my teaching career on A-level chemistry and have had to develop ways of explaining ideas and asking questions to help students develop their understanding. Hopefully, this website will enable me to extend that process to a wider audience… Hence the website name “ChemistryExplained”.

With a bit of luck, some of the content will also be useful for students studying similar qualifications elsewhere in the world, although I know relatively little about any other courses. Perhaps the A-level will offer a useful but different perspective on chemistry? It would be interesting to know if that was the case, so please get in contact and tell me what you think.

For aim 2) I have been interested in chemistry since studying it myself for A-level in the early 1990s. It still fascinates me and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it. I hope I can help the readers of this site to develop their own interest too. So my second aim is perhaps to make this “Chemistry Expanded” as well as “Explained”. I don’t think trying to limit yourself to just the exam board specifications is a good way to approach chemistry – that tells you what you’ll get asked questions about at the end, but in the meantime, learning and understanding as much as possible is the most important thing. And it is that which will help you develop your own interest. Hence, the pages I write here will include more than the bare minimum and show you more chemistry than standard text books tend to do nowadays.

Websites barely existed when I studied A-level, but I hope this will become the kind of site I would have enjoyed reading at that stage of my education.

What the site will include

I am preparing sets of notes on all areas of A-level chemistry and attempting to explain it all in a straightforward way.

I want to avoid the common errors I see in many other resources which are either:

a) Using unnecessarily complex language and assuming too much prior understanding.

or

b) Simplifying the content so much that there isn’t enough material to help develop your understanding properly.

I will value your feedback as to whether or not I’m succeeding in this.

I am also going to add sets of questions (and answers) that you can use to test your understanding after reading each set of notes. My intention is that answering the questions and checking your understanding will help point you in the direction of what to read next.

However… I am starting from scratch and there’s a lot to write about…. completing everything will take some time!

What this site is not

This is not specifically a revision website. In my opinion, for much of an A-level course, you should focus on improving your understanding of the content. Take time to think about the ideas involved – many of these are significant steps forward in human understanding of the world and were challenging for the scientists who discovered them! Why should it be any different for us?! Make sure you can explain why things happen, or why answering a question requires a specific step or calculation. That is the key to understanding it well yourself.

As for the exams… I think they can wait until later in the course, once your understanding is very good. And guess what… if you understand the chemistry really well, most of your exam questions will take care of themselves!

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