Hello BITeS readers,

Greetings everyone. As promised, I am giving you an update on the project meeting. So far our plan for going to Tampa to be warm has been an abject failure. Although I must admit, it is warmer than where I was staying in Pennsylvania. But the chilly weather has kept the LC focused on getting lots of work done. One thing they have managed to do is create a new type of Learning Object, the Syllabus LO (https://www.ionicviper.org/node/add/syllabus). And this should be just in time for your spring class!

You may recognize the title as a line from a classic song by John Lennon. I was actually inspired by the preceding line, "and what have you done?" But it would be more fiting to ask the question, "and what can we do?" In a little over a week from the posting of this BITeS, I will be traveling to Tampa for a project meeting with most of the other members of the leadership council (and I swear, if Chip puts me in a suitcase again I am going to give him such a bite!).

There is nothing like an end of the year report to remind you of the past. In this case it reminded me to the Top 10 lists that I said would be semi-regular contributions to BITeS. It started with a list of the Top 10 Lit Discussions and was followed up with the Top 10 Problem Sets.

The 2018 NSF-CHE Early Career Investigator Workshop will be held March 26–27, 2018 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Alexandria, VA.

The IONiC Leadership Council has recently received a grant from NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program.  (See related BITEs post here.)

The grant will support three cohorts of twenty faculty who will each develop their own “VIPEr-ized” foundation-level inorganic chemistry course. Through classroom observations, analysis of student work, surveys of students, and interviews with faculty, we will generate data on how changes in the classroom affect student learning.

Let's face it, it's that time in the semester. The students are sick. They are handing in exams and papers and you just want to run them through an autoclave. Throw on top of that all kinds of other work. This week for me has included 3 sections of gen chem exams, reading through approximately 100 abstracts for our sessions at ACS this spring, and reading through about 100 submissions for various on campus funding opportunities for a committee I am on. So, the fact that I need to get a BITeS post together is not making things easier.

Every snake sheds its skin at some point and we here at VIPEr are no different. While we are thrilled about our latest NSF grant and excited to continue to grow this community, the leadership council also recognizes that the winds of change are blowing. By the end of this grant we hope to see some changes in the composition of the leadership council that will bring in people with great new ideas. We want to get a start on that process now by inviting members of the community to become more active in the day to day maintainance of the VIPEr website.

Greetings loyal BITeS readers. It's hard to believe that it is once again time to start planning for our Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry oral and poster sessions at the spring ACS meeting. This coming March we return to the place where VIPEr officially launched on the internet, New Orleans. This year my co-organizers are Lori Watson and Chip Nataro, but we all know it is me who does all of the hard work.

I'm just starting the third week of my Foundations Inorganic Course, which I like to call GenChem III. This is the course where I tell my science majors the "why?" behind all those pesky Periodic Trends we made them memorize in GenChem. I teach my course pretty heavily focused on bonding and much less on Periodicity. But we do spend some time early on in the course on the orbitals, shielding effects and the repercussions on periodicity.