This website provides a link to a simple downloadable program that introduces students to a Schlenk line through a series of short animations. It is designed for Windows (does not appear to work on Windows 8 or on Macs). While a bit rudimentary, it does a nice job of showing students the basic setup, discussing safety concerns with the liquid nitrogen trap, and outlining the general procedure for starting up and shutting down the Schlenk line.
Students in a sophomore-level inorganic chemistry course were asked to read the paper “High-Pressure Synthesis and Characterization of the Alkali Diazenide Li2N2” (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 1873-1875. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201108252) in preparation for a class discussion. For many students, this was a first exposure to reading the primary literature.
We have prepared a YouTube video demonstrating a visually accessible kinetic isotope effect in the Cr(VI) oxidation process, a reaction commonly encountered in introductory organic chemistry. The demo provides students with an opportunity to see an isotope effect and then understand how it can be used to provide mechanistic evidence for the identification of a rate-determining reaction step.
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.
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.
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
This is a jmol display of the atomic orbitals from 1s to 4f that can be rotated in space. They are plotted relative to the x, y, and z-axes.
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:
I found this great website linked from somewhere a few days or a week ago and already forgot where. But I am teaching organic lab this semester and convinced one of the students to do a little research. As a reward, I am going to buy her, and the whole class, gelly roller pens for keeping their notebooks.
This is a GREAT site that has so much detail on keeping a lab notebook. There is a lot of great stuff in there.
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.