Several years ago I began using a set of Ligand-of-the-Week exercises in my Inorganic course to encourage (force) students to go outside of our textbook and into the chemical reference materials and chemical literature to find examples of ligands that bind to metal ions. My motivation was to get my students to see the wonderful breadth of known metal-ligand complexes and to develop skills associated with analyzing and classifying ligands. My original paper is fairly complete and can be accessed via J. Chem. Educ. which is now available through the ACS website.

Groups of 2-4 students (depending on class size) are each assigned a different collaborative project that involves using DFT calculations to evaluate some of the principles of inorganic structure and bonding developed in lectures throughout the semester.  Each “project” involves comparing the computed properties (spectroscopic (IR), geometric,or relative energies) of a series of molecules and drawing conclusions about the observed differences using concepts developed in class.

Students in the courses I teach (primarily general chemistry) have struggled with understanding the three representations of matter: macroscopic, particle, and symbolic. This is particularly evident when these representations extend into reactions. Additionally, students struggle with understanding basic concepts of aqueous solutions and, by extension, reactions in aqueous solution. This activity is designed to help the students recognize different types of representations and then generate these for simple systems.

This is written for a freshman seminar course, "Nuclear Chemistry and Medicine," open to all majors.  It meets once per week for one hour, and is meant to facilitate the transition into college for first-year students by providing an informal educational experience. It should be adaptable to a lecture-format course, and I will try to do this for my Junior-year Inorganic Chemistry. 

This is an in class exercise that I use to introduce structure and magnetism to a junior/senior level course on bioinorganic chemistry. The class is cross-listed between Chemistry and Biochemistry. All of the students have had general chemistry and organic (with some exposure to MO Theory). Many of the students have also had the sophomore-level inorganic course, which delves extensively into MO theory, and some of the the students have also had the senior-level course on transition metal chemistry which looks deeply at d-orbital splitting.

My technique for constructing MO diagrams is based on (and significantly simplified from) that of Verkade.  While I find it works well in my classroom for my students, they benefit from careful step-by-step instruction of the method through several weeks of in-class exercises.  This LO has links to pencasts where I go through three easy examples that demonstrate the technique, as well has how I handle lone pairs by this method.  As transition metal complexes don’t have stereochemically active lone pairs, they are often easier to deal with than even something seemingly as simple as water!