This is a beginning-of-semester "warm up." The goals are to help students reconnect to their prior knowledge about atomic orbitals and to introduce and practice the fundamentals of good small group work.
Students construct models of ionic solids in class and answer a series of questions about the structures.
The students write a 2-page chemistry autobiography at the beginning of the semester in order to reflect on their previous chemistry learning experiences, express their expectations for the class, and help me get to know them.
Miessler and Tarr is an inorganic textbook which is is best suited to an upper-division one-semester inorganic course, though there is more material than can be covered in a single semester, so some choice of topics is necessary. It is very well suited for a course oriented around structure, bonding, and reaction chemistry of transition metal compounds, but is very limited in its treatment of solids, main-group, descriptive chemistry, and bioinorganic. Pchem would be helpful but is not necessary. In particular, the treatment of MO theory is very in-depth. The quality of end-of chapter p
This is an Excel spreadsheet that contains the radial factors of the H-atom wavefunctions for the 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3d, and 4s orbitals as a function of multiples of the Bohr radius. Plots are also included of the radial factors (R) vs. r and the radial probability distribution (4πr2R2) vs. r. These can be used during lecture to illustrate to students how these plots change for each type of orbital, or for different principal quantum numbers, or for changing effective nuclear charge.
This is an assignment designed to help students begin to reflect on professional ethics of scientific practice. I have used this in a freshman and a senior seminar after 2-3 days of discussion of what professional ethics is and how one goes about choosing a course of action in an ethical dilemma. I use:
I wanted a modern organometallic experiment showing the utility of Pd for coupling reactions. Students attempted a variety of reaction conditions during the spring of 2007 and 2008. Eventually, we were able to get the reaction to work with a variety of primary amines (linear, cyclohexylamine) and t-butylamine. Yields are not great (40-80%) and this experiment needs some optimization. However, products were observed by GC-MS and NMR.