This is a group activity I developed for my "Introduction to Chemistry" class, which is set up primarily to cover the topics we consider to be prerequisites for the first course in our chemistry sequence at Carleton. However, it covers aspects of thermodynamics (e.g., particularly Hess's Law) that are core topics for most intro courses.
My first computational collection
In this activity, students construct molecular orbital correlation diagrams for several species (H2, He2, HeH), in a semi-quantitative fashion using a ruler and a list of first ionization energies. All the MO schema are placed on a common energy scale, and the stability of each orbital is reported using "cm from the top of the paper" as the unit of energy.
This learning object focuses on the new video series, “Voices in Inorganic Chemistry,” established to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the American Chemical Society journal, Inorganic Chemistry. The are currently 12 videos celebrating pioneers in the field of inorganic chemistry. This activity consists of two components, namely the students watching one interview and writing an essay about their chosen inorganic chemist.
These are a group of outstanding resources for materials science and solid state chemistry. They are all tutorials with Flash animation. I find these to be an excellent review for myself and an excellent primer for my students. Because there are so many useful tutorials on the site, I've highlighted the ones that I think are most appropriate for use in an undergraduate curriculum. These range from introductory to advanced material.
Crystallography & Diffraction
In this in-class activity, students are broken up into teams of 4, which are then sub-divided into two teams of two for the building of the structures. The activity makes use of the ICE Solid State Model kits, and each group should have their own full kit.
The activity has 6 sets of structures for the teams to build; depending on the length of your class, you could have each team build all six sets OR have each team build one of the six sets to then share with the rest of the class.
A - HCP and CCP
B - Primitive cubic and CsCl
In this paper by Andersen and Berg (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1988, 110 (14), pp 4849–4850) the authors present magnetic measurements that refute the calculated ground state of an organometallic cobalt nitrosyl dimer. Students will learn about two physical techniques for measuring magnetism and will learn how magnetic measurements can be used to indicate paramagnetism versus diamagnetism.
This is a literature-based activity that focuses on a review I recently published as part of a thematic series on C-H activation.
The review highlights similarities between the newly discovered frustrated Lewis pairs and polarized metal-ligand multiple bonds. There are many ways to use the review, but the attached set of questions focuses on drawing analogies among seemingly diverse types of reactivity using frontier-molecular-orbital considerations.
This is a jmol display of the atomic orbitals from 1s to 4f that can be rotated in space. They are plotted relative to the x, y, and z-axes.
This is the In Class Activity that I use to review the concepts of Lewis Dot Structures, LDS, (connectivity, resonance, formal charges, etc.) learned in General Chemistry and to introduce new ideas of resonance contributions to the character of the molecule. The question itself is apparently very simple, but the discussion that it produces can be quite rich and brings in both new and old ideas of LDS, providing both a good review and a good segue into advanced ideas of Lewis Dot Structures.