This learning object focuses on the new video series, “Voices in Inorganic Chemistry,” established to commemorate the 50^th 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.

In this in-class activity, students are broken up into teams of 4, which are then sub-divided into two teams of two for the building of the structures. The activity makes use of the ICE Solid State Model kits, and each group should have their own full kit.

The activity has 6 sets of structures for the teams to build; depending on the length of your class, you could have each team build all six sets OR have each team build one of the six sets to then share with the rest of the class.

A - HCP and CCP

B - Primitive cubic and CsCl

Recent versions of Wolfram's Mathematica software have access to a variety of curated data sets that are relevant to Chemists.  This activity is an example of how one can use the ElementData dataset to develop an on-line tool to explore periodic trends.  Wolfram provides a free web-based platform (the FreeCDF plugin) to view and interact with specifically designed Mathematica files.  The activity can be accessed in one of three ways:

This is an in-class activity--or an activity students do prior to class to in preparation for an in-class discussion--to help students identify stylistic components of published writing.  I provide the students with an appropriate journal article, typically a communication from Inorganic Chemistry, such as Inorg. Chem. 2008, 47, 2922-2924 (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/ic702373b) or Inorg. Chem.