I developed this laboratory experiment for our instrumental analysis class. The course is taken by junior and senior chemistry majors, who for the most part have had one inorganic chemistry course and some physical chemistry. The laboratory is operationally very simple and has students record the UV-vis spectra of transition metal sulfate salts in water using volumetric technique. They record the molar absorptivities for each peak and use this data to determine the number of waters of hydration for each salt by comparing with literature absorptivity values.

In this project students are asked to reproduce published calculations of molecular orbital energies of a series of derivatized fullerenes and correlate them with published reduction and oxidation potentials obtained from cyclic voltammetry. The particular subset of the derivatives to be studied are chosen by the student and this choice is part of the learning activity. The students then carry out additional calculations using other theoretical models to see whether they improve the correlation between computed and experimental properties.