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.
A Geometric Exploration of Metallic and Ionic Solid State Structure
Two worksheets are given that walk students though visualizing and understanding solid state structure. The first worksheet focuses on metallic structure by introducing primitive, body-centered, and face-centered packing types in a cubic unit cell. Then, close packing structures are described followed by a discussion of holes in close packed or primitive packed lattices. The second worksheet introduces ionic solid structure types for the common binary salt lattices as well as perovskite and spinel structure types.
Hydrocyanation
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
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.
3D Printed Crystal Structure Activity
This exercises uses beads to help show how different crystal structures are formed. The exercise includes 3D-printed boxes with starting structures incorporated in the bottom to increase the stability of structures that students build. The exercise also includes a number of additional 3D-printed manipulatives to help students visualize the unit cells and other properties of different crystal structures. These include unit cells with accurate atomic and hold dimensions and several different ways to visualize the layer structures in close-packed structures.
Replace the Orbitron
There are several LO's on the site that use the Orbitron which unfortunately is no longer available. Here is another option that should allow use of those LO's.
SLiThEr #61: Resources for teaching cyberinfrastructure skills in the chemistry curriculum
Here's the video for SLiThEr #61:
Moleculuar Computation and Visualization in Undergraduate Education (MoleCVUE)
The MoleCVUE website contains several items that should be of interest to the VIPEr community, especially the activities. Each activity is designed to be ready to deploy in lecture, laboratory, or as homework. There are activities covering all of the major subdisciplines of chemistry (some more than others). Some activities that might be of particular interest to VIPEr are "Group Theory", "VSEPR", and "Electron Configurations of Atoms and Ions". All of the activities are written to use WebMO, but could be adapted for other systems. Most activities are doable with the free or demo versi
Orca Computational Chemistry Tutorials (Neese)
Frank Neese was honored with the 2024 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry for outstanding accomplishments in combining high-level theory with experiment to obtain insight into the properties and reactivities of transition-metal complexes and metalloenzymes.
His major contributions to the field have been through the development and dissemination of his free computational modeling software program ORCA, which is used by thousands of researchers across the fields of inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry.
Pagination
- Page 1
- Next page