Periodic Table of Haiku
Description
This is a great website that was forwarded to me by a friend. Broaden students' scientific communication skills by condensing the descriptive chemistry of an element down to a haiku.
Video explanations and practice problems of basic chemistry and math topics
Description
This is a website which links to a wide variety of good quality YouTube mini-lectures on basic topics in chemistry, mathematics, physics and a variety of other sciences. Each video is about 10 minutes long and many go through example problems slowly and completely.
Pyrophoric Liquid Safety Video
Description
This website is a video put out by UCLA and is a good general introduction to using pyrophorics. It would be good for required viewing for ALL researchers who intend to use Grignards, alkyl metals, organometallics, LiH, etc.
Updated June 2015 to provide a new link; the old link no longer worked.
Biological and medical examples in intro chem at MIT
Description
I read about these new biology examples for intro chem in a recent Association for Women in Science (AWIS) Washington Wire (December 2009, Issue II). Professor Catherine Drennan from MIT and her colleagues introduced "examples of biological and medical topics that demonstrate chemistry principles into her introductory chemistry lectures to highlight the connection between the fields of biology and medicine, that students often love, and chemistry." Their assessment showed that the examples increased student satisfaction with the course.
Chemistry Bingo Generator
Description
I used this Excel spreadsheet to generate bingo cards for teaching *organic* nomenclature and functional groups to first year students during a recitation section. I gave each student a handful of pennies and a bingo card generated randomly. The topics could be easily changed to inorganic nomenclature, solid state lattices, you name it. Its a quick way to review a small amount of material before an exam.
Free Rice...and Periodic Table Symbols?
Description
A neat site that quizzes you on chemical symbols (e.g., Ag for silver), and donates rice for right answers. Hey, if students are going to learn chemical symbols, they may as well do it in a game setting, and many will find it a touch less pointless if they're doing someone else some good at the same time.
Sol-Gel Silica: Nanoarchitectures of Being and Nothingness
Description
In this lab experiment, students use sol-gel chemistry to prepare silica gel monoliths from tetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS). Carrying out the hydrolysis and condensation under acid-catalyzed vs.
Basic Chemistry Review
Description
This website is a self-paced review of concepts for gen chem and includes test questions (and answers) for the reader. It would be a great site to point your intro chem students to if they want/need extra review. It is a set of 10 units, covering things like stoichiometry, unit conversions, and basic acid-base chemistry.
Theo Gray's Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home--But Probably Shouldn't
Description
Theo Gray has compiled some of his Popular Science columns into a beautiful book of sometimes dangerous experiments, many of them with particular relevance to inorganic chemistry! With chapter names like "Experimental Cuisine", "Doomsday DIY", and "Twisted Shop Class", you know you in for a wild ride. Some particularly intriguing experiments include electroplating a copper design on your iPod, making glass and elemental silicon out of sand, making a burning Mg/dry ice sculpture, anodizing Ti for cool color effects, and creating a "hill billy hot tub" using 600 lbs of quicklime.
Introduction to High Resolution Spectroscopy
Description
http://assign3.chem.usyd.edu.au/spectroscopy/index.php
A series of Java tools for learning about the relationship between molecular parameters (size, mass etc) and the form of the spectral trace. These cover rotational, vibrational, ro-vibrational and electronic spectroscopy.