Computers are the way of the
future for chemists.
Industrial and research labs
use the computer to acquire information and control data, and
most equipment used by professional chemists incorporates
computers.
That means chemistry
students will have to face up to a world of computerized
instrumentation.
At Université de
Sherbrooke, chemistry labs are already in the 21st century.
There, the Department of Chemistry has equipped two labs with
computers to automate most physical chemistry experiments and
many instrumental experiments so that students can get to
know the systems and software they'll use in their future
careers. An added advantage: computers give students greater
independence in their work. 
It took Professor Jacques
Gigučre and Jean-René Martin, coordinator of laboratories,
12 years to complete this ambitious project. They had to
interface equipment to computers and write suitable programs
to allow students to perform 12 different experiments.
The computer has now become
the accepted working and teaching tool at Université de
Sherbrooke. Students look on handwritten reports as archaic,
work directly on the computer, and do all their experiments
at the keyboard.
The meters and transducers
of pressure, temperature and light intensity are connected
directly to the computers. Students control the data
collection process, view the data, store it on disks, and
ultimately treat the results graphicafly, statistically or
mathematically using software programs such as Quattro, Lotus
1,2,3 or locally developed statistical programs.
After the experiment,
students have nearly all the tables, graphs and calculations
they need to write their final reports.
This method is fast,
effective and economical. It replaces the slow and tedious
visual observations that up to now were the only way to
collect data. Errors are reduced. Accuracy is increased by a
factor of anywhere from 10 to 100. The speed and power of the
computer save time, and that makes more time for direct
interaction between students and professors.
In fact, students and
professors see the computer as an ideal colleague. It's an
untiring collaborator, able to handle mechanical and
repetitive work quickly, effectively and cheaply.
Université de Sherbrooke is
one of the few universities in North America to use computers
in this way. The Chemistry Department, a leader in the field,
is producing a book and computer disks so that colleagues at
other universities can implement the Sherbrooke system in
their own labs.
