The MoleCVUE website contains several items that should be of interest to the VIPEr community, especially the activities.  Each activity is designed to be ready to deploy in lecture, laboratory, or as homework.  There are activities covering all of the major subdisciplines of chemistry (some more than others).  Some activities that might be of particular interest to VIPEr are "Group Theory", "VSEPR", and "Electron Configurations of Atoms and Ions".  All of the activities are written to use WebMO, but could be adapted for other systems.  Most activities are doable with the free or demo versi

This is a literature-based end of semester project.  After a semester of introducing literature in the form of typical literature discussions, this assignment is given to small groups.  It may be easily amended or added to.  Each group is provided with a paper and accompanying questions that are similar to the literature discussions they have done over the semester.  They then must use these guiding questions to assemble a presentation to the class.  The topics chosen and the guiding questions are designed to provide students with a taste of the many areas of inorganic chemistry that are no

This LO was inspired by a talk that Megan Fieser gave at the 2024 Organometallic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference. It was an excellent talk with some really interesting chemistry. Wanting something with practical application for my class focused on organometallic chemistry, I looked at one of her 'older' papers and found this really interesting rhodium catalyst. In the main paper for this LO (Mater. Horiz. 2023, 10, 2047), the catalytic dechlorination of poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) using a rhodium pincer complex is described.

This is a literature discussion regarding electron counting.  It involves several opportunities for students to use CBC to determine electron counts themselves.  Then, it demonstrates the first case of a 21-electron complex, which leads to great discussion regarding the 18-electron rule.  Throughout the discussion, students are introduced to many structural and spectrochemical analyses, some of which may be new to them.

This article focuses on a theoretical analysis of K-edge X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) of Fe(CO)₅ in the D_3h and C_4v geometries. For the context of a one semester inorganic chemistry / physical inorganic chemistry course, the authors use computational methods and experimental X-ray techniques to generate the XANES spectra of two different geometries of Fe(CO)₅. Densities of states are used to show overlap between specific orbitals (Fe p with C p), indicating pi-backbonding.

Frank Neese was honored with the 2024 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry for outstanding accomplishments in combining high-level theory with experiment to obtain insight into the properties and reactivities of transition-metal complexes and metalloenzymes. 

His major contributions to the field have been through the development and dissemination of his free computational modeling software program ORCA, which is used by thousands of researchers across the fields of inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry.

This literature discussion learning object describes the isolation and structure of tetrabenzylthorium, a molecule that was synthesized many years ago but was never thoroughly characterized.