When teaching my advanced bioinorganic chemistry course, I extensively incorporate structures from Protein Data Bank in both my assignments and classroom discussions and mini-lectures. I also have students access structures both in and out of class as they complete assignments.
This is a great app that helps students see the symmetry in molecules. It allows you to choose a molecule (by name, structure, or point group) and display a 3D rendition of it. You can then have it display the symmetry elements, and/or apply all the symmetry operations.
It is available for both android and apple phones: (probably easier to just search for it)
apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3d-sym-op/id1067556681?mt=8
For inorganic lab, I have my students write their lab reports in the style of the journal Inorganic Chemistry. The first week of lab, we spend time in small groups looking at several examples of recent articles from Inorganic Chemistry, focusing mainly on the experimental section and the abstract (as these are included in every lab report). We then come back together as a class to have a discussion of each of the sections in the articles. We discuss what was included in each section, what wasn’t included, and the style, tone, tense, and voice of each section.
This in-class activity can be used to teach structural (or constitutional) isomers. This worksheet presumes that students have already had some experience with transition metal complexes such as determining metal oxidation state, recognizing the coordination sphere, and converting between formulas and structures.
Pulsed Gradient Spin Echo (PGSE) DOSY is a NMR technique used for determining the hydrodynamic radius of a molecule in solution by measuring the rate of diffusion. This technique requires a standard, usually tetrakis(trimethylsilyl)silane (TMSS). This activity will cover the basics of how PGSE works and includes built in animations to demonstrate how the nuclear magnetization is affected. Each slide has comments explaining the content for the user's convenience.
I present a format for more effective communiction of errors in lab reports to students that I term Errors Checklists. Grading lab reports are one of the banes of our existence as professors. They are endless, unremitting papers that need to be scrutinized for accuracy, precision and understanding.
Students are confronted with a number of new types of isomerism as they move from organic chemistry into inorganic chemistry. This can be confusing and students often have trouble visualizing structures and differentiating between isomers. In this exercise, students are asked to examine a number of different crystal structures from the Teaching Subset (distributed with Mercury version 3.10, early 2018) of the Cambridge Structural Database.
Introduction to classical and modern techniques for
synthesizing inorganic compounds of representative and transition
metal elements and the extensive use of IR, NMR, mass, and UV-visible
spectroscopies and other physical measurements to characterize
products. Syntheses and characterization of inorganic and organic
materials/polymers are included. Attendance at departmental seminars
required. Lecture, laboratory, oral presentations.
This exercise looks at the metal complexes of tropocoronand ligands, which were first studied by Nakanishi, Lippard, and coworkers in the 1980s. The size of the metal binding cavity in these macrocyclic ligands can be varied by changing the number of atoms in the linker chains between the aminotroponeimine rings, similar to crown ethers. These tetradentate ligands bind a number of +2 metal centers (Cd, Co, Cu, Ni, and Zn) and the geometry of the donor atoms around the metal center changes with the number of atoms in the linker chains.