Chemistry-major freshmen often learn problem-solving skills in the classroom rather than in the laboratory. The problems that are usually given by teachers or from textbooks are almost virtual-situation rather than real-world. In this study, we provided our students with a real-world problem on the thickness and the atomic layer of laminated aluminum foil. This study includes four main facets: (i) Developing teaching materials; (ii) Describing strategies of problems solving; (iii) Examining students’ problem solving; and (iv) Analyzing students’ learning feedback. This study concludes: (a) Teacher-developed experiments are suitable as real-time teaching materials for students’ hands-on learning for general and analytical chemistry laboratories; (b) In term of laminated aluminum foil using four flexible food packages as samples determined by the teacher and students, the thicknesses range 0.000549-0.000652 cm (4.59-6.52 μm) and 0.000480-0.000688 cm (4.80-6.88 μm), as well as show 27100-32200 and 22500-32600 atomic layers, respectively; (c) Student’s learning feedback reveal that the overwhelming majority of students have positive responses in cognitive domain, affective domain and science process skills.