A collection of all of the IONiC VIPEr SLiThErs (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable). These events are short presentations on a topic followed by a period of discussion between the presenter and live participants. Each of these events is recorded and posted to the IONiC VIPEr YouTube Channel.
In celebration of the 2025 Nobel prize in Chemistry awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yagi, this collection features various LOs about MOFs.
This is a really interesting paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2025, 147, 34641-34646) involving a complex salt in which both the cation and anion are metallocenes. While a majority of the paper is focused on the characterization of two new compounds, it presents some excellent opportunities to practice counting electrons, one of which was a challenge to this author.
This literature discussion is in honor of Dr. Josh Figueroa, recipient of the 2026 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry. Josh has done some tremendous work with isocyanide ligands and this paper is but a brief glimpse into this field. The complexes of interest contain carbonyl ligands and isocyanide ligands, so there are plenty of opportunities for students to use group theory to predict the number of IR-active vibrations for these ligands.
This literature discussion was prepared as part of the 2025 ACS awards collection in honor of Gary J. Schrobilgen, winner of the M. Frederick Hawthorne Award in Main Group Inorganic Chemistry.
This LO was developed as a review activity for the end of the semester. Students are required to touch on a wide range of topics including acid-base theories, crystal systems, point groups, the spectrochemical series, and 19F NMR spectroscopy. A close reading of the paper is required helping to build student comprehension of the literature.
This is a literature-based end of semester project. After a semester of introducing literature in the form of typical literature discussions, this assignment is given to small groups. It may be easily amended or added to. Each group is provided with a paper and accompanying questions that are similar to the literature discussions they have done over the semester. They then must use these guiding questions to assemble a presentation to the class. The topics chosen and the guiding questions are designed to provide students with a taste of the many areas of inorganic chemistry that are no
This LO was written by the IONiC Leadership Council to celebrate Steve Koch as the recipient of the 2024 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry. Steve has been a major supporter of the IONiC community since its inception. This LO is based on the article New Members of the Class of [Fe(CN)x(CO)y] Compounds. published in Inorganic Chemistry (DOI: 10.1021/ic015604y).
This was the 57th SLiThEr, presented by Dr. George Stanley, retired professor from LSU. It was a very interesting story and would be a valuable lesson to students about proper characterization and working with challenging and paramagnetic systems.
I wanted my organometallic class to explore the bonding and spectroscopy of the Kubas dihydrogen complex without having to spend the time doing the entire literature discussion (which is really great and I have done it many times in the past) because I wanted to do it in only about 20-30 minutes in a 75 minute class period. Most of the questions come from the Kubas literature discussion, which I shortened. The IR and reduced mass calculations come from an LO I wrote about arene activation by Jones and Feher.