Beginning with Volume 43, Issue 25, Inorganic Chemistry began publishing Forums.
Inorganic Chemistry Forums consist of a set of thematically linked papers from leading scientists on a multidisciplinary topic of growing interest. Papers present overviews, research perspectives and original research reports on the Forum theme and are highlighted on the cover of the journal issue in which they appear.
This is an in-class exercise for upper level inorganic students designed to highlight aspects of symmetry, group theory, MO theory, and Hückel theory. The exercise is an expansion of a Problem Set question I give to my Advanced Inorganic Chemistry class. In this activity, students will develop the MO diagram for the π system of the pentalene dianion using the Hückel approach. They will then consider the effect of folding the ring system using a Walsh diagram.
Bob Morris of the University of Toronto created this website when he was teaching a class on Bioinorganic Chemistry.
Maggie Geselbracht has a great fondness for compounds with too many nitrogen atoms next to each other. This is a collection of problem sets and class activites based on the structure, bonding, and spectroscopy of a number of such compounds, drawn from the recent literature.
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 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.