National ACS Award Winners 2022 LO Collection

This collection of learning objects was created to celebrate the National ACS Award Winners 2022 who are members of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. The list of award winners is shown below. 

Shirley Lin / United States Naval Academy Sat, 03/12/2022 - 07:01
SLiThErs - Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable

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.

Chip Nataro / Lafayette College Thu, 12/17/2020 - 14:18
Metallocene cations and anions
Description

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.

Chip Nataro / Lafayette College Tue, 09/23/2025 - 11:39

Hydrocyanation

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Mon, 07/07/2025 - 07:35
Description

This literature discussion was inspired by a talk given by Dr. Nora Radu, recipient of the 2025 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry. It is a bit 'big picture' in nature in that the hydrocyanation reaction is important for the synthesis of nylon. As such, there is a significant amount of background material relating to nylon-6,6. Students will read an article from C&EN, portions of a patent, and portions of an article from J. Chem.

COMFORT, A web resource for fragment molecular orbitals of simple fragments

Submitted by samuelson / Indian Institute of Science on Tue, 06/17/2025 - 02:56
Description

The website entitled COMFORT (https://ipc.iisc.ac.in/~ags/ip312/comfort.html) is a easy way to visualise fragment molecular orbitals of many different organic ligands and also metal fragments. One can match the frontier orbitals of the fragments to see if they can form stable molecules. It helps one to see how fragments of an octahedral organometallic complex can be stripped of its ligands one by one to generate fragments that can match organic ligands with multiple "pi" bonds.

Determining Oxidation State: The Arrow Pushing Method

Submitted by Jared Pienkos / University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Mon, 04/14/2025 - 10:05
Description
    1. Determining the oxidation state of atoms is foundational in chemistry. For inorganic chemistry, students must be able to accurately calculate oxidation numbers of transition metals, which can differ depending on the ligands attached.
Flipping Cobalt Spin States
Description

This activity was designed to assess student comprehension of how changes in pi-donation from ligands can affect both crystal field splitting and metal spin states.  The activity requires students to practice electron counting, idealized crystal field splitting, and then apply these concepts to explain the observed change from low to high spin caused by the loss of a proton.

James F. Dunne / Central College Fri, 02/21/2025 - 12:01
Coordination Bonding with Main Group Metals(?)
Description

This Literature Discussion considers the synthesis of the first carbene-bismuthinidene complex by Gilliard and coworkers in 2019. This molecule serves as an illustration of different bonding models, as it can be described by multiple resonance structures invoking fully covalent, zwitterionic, and coordinate/dative bonding forms. Students analyze these resonance structures and their geometrical implications, then compare to the experimental structural evidence to come to a conclusion about which bonding model(s) best describe this molecule!

A. M. Christianson / Bellarmine University Wed, 12/11/2024 - 10:19

Literature Discussion Group Project

Submitted by Wes Farrell / United States Naval Academy on Mon, 08/05/2024 - 14:23
Description

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

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