How to Use the Labtop Website

The Labtop website has several forms of navigation and is built to cater to your preferred method of completing lab work. Use the maps and legends below to help figure out the best way for you to use this site!

A. Primary Navigation

The primary navigation will take you to resources that encompass the entire site such as contact information, lists and indexes, glossaries, and chemistry resources that can help you with many different case studies.

B. Case Study Navigation

The case study navigation will change depending on which case study you are working on. This navigation will help you be able to access and reference any part of the case study from any other part of the case study. These menus are expandable, and include links to the subsections within each section of the case study. If you start at the top of the sub-navigation and work your way down, you will follow all pages of the given case study. When you are looking at pages that aren't associated with a case study (such as general resources, contact information, etc.) case study navigation will not appear.

C. Case Study Sub-Navigation

Many sections within a case study are broken down into sub-sections. For example, the background section of the Sugars and Starches section of the case study Soft Machines is broken down into 7 subsections. If you follow the sub-navigation from left to right (like reading a book!) you will follow all the sub-sections of the section.

D. Previous/Back Buttons

For those who prefer a linear flow, just start at page one and click the previous and next buttons to go through a case study. This is especially helpful if you want ALL of the background information to help you be successful at the authentic assessment questions and experiments!

E. Resources

The resources needed to understand the background information or to complete the experiments are found in the resources column. Everything Labtop wants you to see will be here!

F. Resource Reminders

Since the content and experiments can sometimes be overwhelming, Labtop will always remind you when it might be a good time to reference the materials in the resource column! :)

G. Authentic Assessment Questions

The authentic assessment questions are the key to Labtop. These will sometimes stem from background information and sometimes from experiments. So, be sure to check all sections of a case study to ensure that you include answers to all of these questions for your lab reports. Many authentic assessment question will get you to think about the "next step" beyond what the background information or experiment is telling you or telling you to do.

H. Friendly Reminder of Your Current Case Study

Since you may be working on multiple case studies at one time, Labtop provides you a friendly reminder of which case study the current web page is referring to.