Has anyone tried using the inorganic Oxford Chemistry Primers for teaching a semester long, intermediate-level course? I've been using Glen Rogers' book, but there are a lot of things that needed updating and the latest version didn't address many of them. I really like his organization and depth of coverage and I haven't found anything else that is similar. I thought a combination of the Primers might do it. Any comments?
I've been teaching upper-level advanced inorganic and just wanted to alert the Shriver & Atkins users that the Tanabe-Sugano diagrams for the d2 and d8 electronic configurations are incorrect. It's subtle, but a nuisance nonetheless.
If anyone has developed a good learning object (LO) about quasicrystals and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, it would be a great resource to have on VIPEr. Of course, there is lots of good info on the Nobel site: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011/.
This fall, I went to plot the radial probability function of the 4s orbital and realized that I couldn't find the radial function of the 4s orbital in any of my chemistry (or physics) books. I asked a p-chemist friend for help and we realized that every book that the two of us owns only plots the orbitals to a value of principle quantum number n=3. A google search actually wasn't a lot of help.
Colleagues,
I love crystal field theory, but I would like to try and extend this idea to the f-orbitals. We know how the d-orbitals split in an a variety of environments, but how do the f orbitals split? I want to develop an assignment for my students where they can use their knowledge from the d-orbitals to think about how the f-orbitals would split. Any ideas? I know CFT is not as important for the lanthanides, but I think it could be an interesting extension to what students typically learn about CFT.
My wife (a high school math teacher and huge graphing calculator supporter) was asked by one of her science colleagues (not a graphing calculator fan) what kind of policies there were in colleges about calculator use in chemistry classes in particular. I knew immediately where to go to get answers. As inorganic chemists there is a good chance we spend some time teaching gen. chem. (if your school has such a beast). I was just curious as to what kind of calculator policy (if any) other places had.
We previously had only one semester of inorganic chemistry, and now we are adding a "foundational" course to conform to ACS guidelines. Because some of the descriptive chemistry of the elements is covered in general chemistry (and frankly can often be quite boring for students) we decided to replace that material with bioinorganic applications in our foundational course, in the hope that both chemistry majors and bio majors/chem minors will enjoy it.
We are significantly changing both our course and lab curriculum. One of our goals is to break down barriers between inorganic, organic and biochemistry by treating similar topics in each at the same time rather than in three different courses. For example, one of the lab courses focuses on the use of different types of chromatography used in the three fields.
Has anyone used the "Voices of Inorganic Chemistry" videos in their teaching? Its a relatively new feature from the Journal Inorg. Chem., and I just learned more about them at the Organometallic Gordon Conference. Here is the link. If you have used them, I'd love to hear about how it worked.
Adam
I am teaching a course this fall on writing in chemistry and will have a short section covering grant proposals. I am planning to have the students form small "study sessions" to critique and review grant proposals to give them a sense of what goes into a grant proposal and have them determine for themselves what works and what doesn't.