Chip Nataro (Lafayette College) hosts a live discussion covering the favorite labs that people teach. The discussion somewhat evolved into a conversation on "so, you are teaching inorganic lab for the first time...what do you do?"
A colleague and I started using this Peer Review "lab" activity in our studio-based General Chemistry II course to get students to critically think about what they and their peers were writing on lab reports. When the studio-based course was axed, we continued it in the traditional lab during the fifth or sixth week of a 14 week semester.
Stanley-Gray, Zhang, and Venkataraman from UMass Amherst mined the Cambridge Structural Database to put together graphics that show trends for coordination geometry, distribution of oxidation states, overall coordination geometry, and coordination geometry with specific ligands to understand the influence of ligand on geometry.
In SLiThEr #39 Chip Nataro (Lafayette University) introduces us to the discussion LOs he uses in his senior-level inorganic course and the topics covered.
A sampling of the peer-reviewed literature describing the use of educational games in the undergraduate chemistry classroom. Given that well over 200 publications exist on this topic, this is intended to whet one's appetite for chemistry games rather than be an exhaustive list.
This SLiThEr was presented by Nancy Williams (Keck Science) and Benny Chan (The College of New Jersey) on Inclusivity (particularly from the LGBTQ+ perspective, but in a broader sense as well) in Inorganic Chemistry, with a focus on the inorganic chemistry classroom.
Check it out here:
This literature discussion is based on a 2022 Science paper describing a series of dilanthanide complexes with exceptional magnetic properties due to the presence of metal-metal bonding. These molecules are the first reported species to feature direct bonding between two lanthanides! The paper contains ample material for discussion of molecular symmetry and bonding, oxidation states and electron configurations, and magnetism. The handout includes a description, glossary, discussion questions, and pre-class worksheet.
This is a collection that will help when you are deciding how to introduce inorganic chemistry and/or assess prior knowledge in your inorganic class on the first day.