Experimenting with At-Home General Chemistry Laboratories During the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an at-home laboratory program was created and implemented for a section of the general chemistry course at the University of Southern California. The experiments were designed to only utilize safe household items and no special equipment. These laboratory activities, spanning over 4 weeks, focused on concepts usually covered in the final one-third of our second-semester chemistry laboratory, including pH, acid-base titrations, buffers, solubility, phase equilibria, and thermodynamics. In this article, we describe the design of the laboratories and our experience with this experiment, while also providing an assessment on how similar activities could be integrated profitably into a regular general chemistry course.