In this exercise, students are introduced to Mercury, a program for visualizing and analyzing crystal structure data.  Students are guided through opening the program for the first time and viewing a structure from the Teaching Subset, a selection of structures from the Cambridge Crystallographic Database (CSD). Activites include changing the representation of the complex, moving the structure around the window, accessing information about the structure, and measuring bond lengths and angles within the structure.

This set of questions was used to promote discussion within small groups (3 to 4 students) on how changing ligand properties can have dramatic effects on the product distributions in Pd-catalyzed cross coupling reactions.  The questions are pretty difficult and not always straightforward, partly because they are derived from the primary literature and thus inherently "messy".

In this activity, students apply knowledge of the trans effect to the synthesis of planar Pt(II) complexes that contain cis-amine/ammine motifs.  These complexes are of interest as both potential novel chemotherapeutic Pt(II) complexes and as intermediates for promising chemotherapeutic drugs such as satraplatin.  The questions in this LO are based on recent research described in the paper “Improvements in the synthesis and understanding of the iodo-bridged intermediate en route to the Pt(IV) prodrug satraplatin,” by Timothy C. Johnstone and Stephen C.

In this activity, the provided d orbital splitting patterns need to be matched with ligand geometries. Students are provided with the d orbital splitting diagrams for 6 ligand geometries (octahedral, trigonal bipyramidal, square pyramidal, tetrahedral, square planar, and linear). A web browser is used to view an animation (developed by Flick Coleman) which allows for the visualization of the relationship between the positions of the metal d orbitals and the ligands. Given this information, students should then be able to qualitatively rank the orbitals from highest to lowest energy.

Over the past several years, I've been doing this in-class exercise shortly after discussing mechanisms of ligand exchange. The exercise expands on the lecture material by having the students think about metal ions, rather than ligands, exchanging from a coordination complex. The students are encouraged to work in groups of 3-5 and actively discuss the material amongst themselves before we go over it as a class. I do not provide the students with the article ahead of time, so that they may come up with their own conclusions, as opposed to simply repeating those of the authors.

Late in their junior year and into the first two months of their senior year, chemistry majors at Willamette write and submit a research proposal.  Shortly before entering the lab for their thesis work, I lead this activity that takes place in our Senior Projects seminar class.  The class meets one hour per week and we cover topics such as how to write an effective grant proposal, ethics in science, presenting data, etc., as well as this safety activity.