Ahhhhhh, New Orleans. I have such mixed feelings about this city. It's a wonderful place. Great food, exciting atmosphere, bottomless hurricanes, and, more important for our community, it is the site where Adam Johnson pushed the big red button that officially launced VIPEr to the web. Why do I have mixed feelings? It's also the place that Chip Nataro decided that I could be an accessory during his talks. If snakes could shudder, I would. In a little over a week we will be decending on New Orleans for the third time!

In early February I was teaching vibrational motion in water using vibrational mode analysis and group theory. I remember learning about vibrational modes as an undergraduate and I remember distinctly feeling uneasy about it. Why can’t water just vibrate one of the two OH bonds at a time? What is it that forces the linear combination of the two OH stretches into the symmetric and antisymmetric stretches?

We are excited to announce our next VIPEr summer workshop!  

Our focus is changing slightly from past workshops, but we will still follow our successful model of having (mostly) PUI/teaching faculty interact directly with primarily research R1 faculty to build content pieces for the classroom based on their research.  

Well, it's that time again... time to announce the annual VIPEr symmetry challenge. First offered in 2009, it had several years of hibernation before coming back in 2017.

This past fall, a bumper crop of junior and senior chemistry majors enrolled in my inorganic laboratory course. In fact, we had enough student interest that we had to open a second weekly 4-hour lab section. The combined group of 18 students ran five experiments of my choosing and then spent two weeks at the end of the semester engaged in nine different independent projects. (See my syllabus LO describing the course here.)

Good news! The new NSF grant allows us to bring back the popular summer content building workshops. Since the focus of the new grant is on development of a sophomore inorganic curriculum, the content workshops will be largely in support of curricular development for that course.

Hello BITeS readers,

Greetings everyone. As promised, I am giving you an update on the project meeting. So far our plan for going to Tampa to be warm has been an abject failure. Although I must admit, it is warmer than where I was staying in Pennsylvania. But the chilly weather has kept the LC focused on getting lots of work done. One thing they have managed to do is create a new type of Learning Object, the Syllabus LO (https://www.ionicviper.org/node/add/syllabus). And this should be just in time for your spring class!

You may recognize the title as a line from a classic song by John Lennon. I was actually inspired by the preceding line, "and what have you done?" But it would be more fiting to ask the question, "and what can we do?" In a little over a week from the posting of this BITeS, I will be traveling to Tampa for a project meeting with most of the other members of the leadership council (and I swear, if Chip puts me in a suitcase again I am going to give him such a bite!).

There is nothing like an end of the year report to remind you of the past. In this case it reminded me to the Top 10 lists that I said would be semi-regular contributions to BITeS. It started with a list of the Top 10 Lit Discussions and was followed up with the Top 10 Problem Sets.