It's hard to believe that we are a little over a week away from the ACS meeting in Denver. As always, VIPEr will be well represented at the meeting. You can get the full details for our technical program from ACS, but I thought it was worth giving you a brief synopsis.

We kick things off Sunday morning with 8 talks on coordination chemistry hosted by Chris Hamaker.

Some of you have already taken advantage of the hard work you've done this semester to create cool symmetry and MO problems, and shared the fruits of your labor with the community as part of our second Community Challenge!

For those who have been meaning to do so, but last week just got too busy, please feel free to submit something! We'll publish the collection of submissions this Friday, but we're publishing the LOs as they come in!

The Journal of Chemical Education has released a trio of articles in the past couple of days that should be of interest to inorganic chemists.  Two were highlighted as the ACS Editor's Choice selection for Tues, March 3 and Wed, March 4.

We have also applied this developmental approach to computational chemistry. General chemistry students predict structures with VSEPR and then explore the shapes and physical properties of these molecules computationally.

Dear Friends of Viper (FoV),

Here we are in the murky middle of the semester when all I can think about is a week off from teaching.  Friday can’t come too soon, and then I have a week that is mine…A week to prep for ACS...Denver is coming fast.  A week to catch up on grading and writing and gasp!... reading the piles of primary literature articles that I have stacked on my desk for when I have time.  Time to put some of the good stuff that I’ve done this semester on VIPEr maybe?  Time to plan for the summer workshop on Catalysis in Seattle?

One of the things that we are hoping to do in our blog posts this year is to highlight some LOs on the site that we've found useful in class.  I'm teaching inorganic this semester and would like to mention two LOs that I've used recently in class to help students visualize delta and lambda stereoisomers and find symmetry operations.  

A ligand orbital? Lorillard Inc. on the NYSE? Some new element that a bunch of scientists made 5 atoms of that lasted 0.2 microseconds? Well, in the world of VIPEr an LO is a learning object. Great...what's a learning object? Wikipedia defines a learning object as "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective".

I am now four weeks into teaching one of my favorite classes at Hope. The official name is Structure, Dynamics, and Synthesis II, but it is known to all as SUPERCHEM (cape not required)! The subject matter is symmetry, group theory, and computational chemistry.

It's Friday. I've just finished my first week of classes and I'm checking some things off of my "first week of classes to do list." Two of these things are related to the broader inorganic chemistry community - the ACS DIC Undergraduate Award in Inorganic Chemistry and the new Foundations of Inorganic Chemistry Exam being developed by the ACS Exams Institute.