Welcome to Chemistry’s Knowledge Acquisition Center (KnAC)

Welcome to KnAC! This site aims to give students tools to learn topics which are considered prerequisite knowledge for courses. These are often topics that instructors do not have time to review in class, but are necessary skills for the course itself. 

Perhaps you never learned it in previous courses, perhaps you forgot, or perhaps you just want to double check. KnAC can be used for any of these!

If you run into any technical problems with the website, videos, or anything else, please contact Amanda Holton at ajholton.uci@gmail.com for assistance.  For content help, the course’s instructor, discussion boards, Piazza, or other course resources should be your first point of contact. 

Site Structure

The site is arranged by current course. You’ll click on the course you are currently enrolling/enrolled in to see the prerequisite skills identified as necessary or beneficial by Professors.  Often, you’ll find that a single skill is required for many courses, and so there is significant repetition across the courses. For Chem 1 and 51 sequences, there is a generalized skill page for skills which are needed across all courses in each sequence. 

Videos

The videos are largely made by UCI Chemistry professors. 

For some technologies, it seemed best to use videos directly from the technology’s help pages, and so you may occasionally see this as well. Our aim was to give you the best resources possible, and sometime this meant going outside of UCI. 

Study Guides and Practice Problems

Each video contains a study guide and a set of practice problems. This is to help focus your studying and to encourage self assessment. Use the study guide to help you take notes and engage with the videos. Then, test your knowledge using the practice problems, and review as needed. It’s important to use this tool and not JUST watch the videos. Imagine trying to learn how to play a video game from watching someone else? Chemistry is very similar. You have to do chemistry to learn to do chemistry!

Get More Help

Lets get started: Click on the course you are enrolling in below to see the prerequisite skills identified by your professors. 

General Study Skills for STEM: Recommended Watching for Everyone. Especially for Freshmen. (Coming Soon)

Chem 1 (General Chemistry Series)

Chem 51 (Organic Chemistry Series)

Chem 132 (Physical Chemistry Series)

Other Courses