Teaching the art of guessing

http://blogs.nature.com/thescepticalchymist/2013/08/teaching-the-art-of-guessing.html

Estimation of chemical quantities is, in my opinion, one of the most important skills a chemist can have. It is also one that my students are simultaneously skeptical of — why not just use a search engine to find the ‘real’ value or crunch numbers to 8 decimal places in your calculator — and intimidated by (I probably don’t help by telling this story about Fermi).

I emphasize the need to gather a tool kit of anchor points (key chemical values) and maps (relationships between quantities) and provide examples. Here is the handout (pdf)