◄Previous: What is a badged course?

# Introduction

Atoms are the basic building blocks of all the substances around you, rather like letters are used to construct words and hence a language. And a look ‘inside’ an atom is perhaps your best starting point when studying chemistry for the first time. As you will learn from this course, it’s the components of the atom that are crucial to understanding how substances behave in chemical reactions, and the behaviour of particles on the atomic (and sub-atomic) scale is often not what you would expect.

◄Contents►Next: Learning outcomes

OpenLearn - Discovering chemistry
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.