BYOL: Bring Your Own Lime Hands-On Laboratory Experience

BYOL (Bring Your Own Lime), a novel laboratory experiment, is introduced in this paper. Students are encouraged to bring affordable household and grocery store chemicals into the classroom. The Bring Your Own Chemical (BYOC) concept demonstrates to students that food and household products are chemicals too. Citruses are often used to highlight the link between everyday life and chemistry. Due to the large amount of citric acid that limes contain, they can be squeezed and their juice used for experimentation. The aim of the experiment is to determine the first stepwise dissociation constant of citric acid in grocery store limes. The BYOL: Bring Your Own Lime laboratory experiment achieves several goals: it makes chemistry relatable, boosts both content knowledge (preparative chemistry, spectrophotometry and conductivity measurements) and soft skills, is not time-consuming (requires 75 min if the provided calibration curve is used), and is an enjoyable experience.