These Learning Objects were used in an advanced undergraduate chemistry course that used computational chemistry as an integrative tool to help students deepen their understanding of structure, bonding, and reactivity and practice their integrative expertise by addressing complex problems in the literature and in their own research.
Metal carbonyls are the most widely studied organometallic complexes. This exercise uses Gaussian with the GaussView interface to investigate the role of the metal centers on backbonding to the CO ligand. Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods were used to evaluate two classic metal pentacarbonyls, namely Fe(CO)5 and Ru(CO)5.
At this website students can access interactive game-like learning resources that cover a wide range of topics in general chemistry. These learning activities, which are in the form of flash cards, quizzes and matching games, will help student learn and review/drill important general chemistry topics.
Bob Morris of the University of Toronto created this website when he was teaching a class on Bioinorganic Chemistry.
This website is a free and comprehensive resource that is a collection of open college courses that spans videos, audio lectures, and notes given by professors at a variety of universities. The website is designed to be friendly and designed to be easily accessed on any mobile device.
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.
This is a literature-based activity that focuses on a review I recently published as part of a thematic series on C-H activation.
The review highlights similarities between the newly discovered frustrated Lewis pairs and polarized metal-ligand multiple bonds. There are many ways to use the review, but the attached set of questions focuses on drawing analogies among seemingly diverse types of reactivity using frontier-molecular-orbital considerations.
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.
This is the In Class Activity that I use to review the concepts of Lewis Dot Structures, LDS, (connectivity, resonance, formal charges, etc.) learned in General Chemistry and to introduce new ideas of resonance contributions to the character of the molecule. The question itself is apparently very simple, but the discussion that it produces can be quite rich and brings in both new and old ideas of LDS, providing both a good review and a good segue into advanced ideas of Lewis Dot Structures.
This in-class activity and the related problem set allows students to discover the linear and bent bonding modes of NO to metals based on VSEPR theory through guided inquiry. Two examples follow which illustrate how the electrons are counted in NO complexes depending on the coordination mode/formal charge of NO. Students must have had prior practice in counting electrons of complexes to complete the problems.