A colleague and I started using this Peer Review "lab" activity in our studio-based General Chemistry II course to get students to critically think about what they and their peers were writing on lab reports. When the studio-based course was axed, we continued it in the traditional lab during the fifth or sixth week of a 14 week semester.
Stanley-Gray, Zhang, and Venkataraman from UMass Amherst mined the Cambridge Structural Database to put together graphics that show trends for coordination geometry, distribution of oxidation states, overall coordination geometry, and coordination geometry with specific ligands to understand the influence of ligand on geometry.
In SLiThEr #39 Chip Nataro (Lafayette University) introduces us to the discussion LOs he uses in his senior-level inorganic course and the topics covered.
My advanced inorganic students often have trouble conceptualizing microstates and term symbols. This exercise is intended to provide a hands-on assembly of microstate models and their combination to form term symbols.
A sampling of the peer-reviewed literature describing the use of educational games in the undergraduate chemistry classroom. Given that well over 200 publications exist on this topic, this is intended to whet one's appetite for chemistry games rather than be an exhaustive list.
This SLiThEr was presented by Nancy Williams (Keck Science) and Benny Chan (The College of New Jersey) on Inclusivity (particularly from the LGBTQ+ perspective, but in a broader sense as well) in Inorganic Chemistry, with a focus on the inorganic chemistry classroom.
Check it out here:
This paper describes the use of a catalytic nickel system for the hydrodefluorination of aryl amides. While organofluorine compounds are extremely useful because of their unique properties, there are growing concerns about the impact of these compounds on the environment. Carbon-fluorine bonds are extremely strong, and so getting them to react is a significant challenge for chemists.
This literature discussion is based on a 2022 Science paper describing a series of dilanthanide complexes with exceptional magnetic properties due to the presence of metal-metal bonding. These molecules are the first reported species to feature direct bonding between two lanthanides! The paper contains ample material for discussion of molecular symmetry and bonding, oxidation states and electron configurations, and magnetism. The handout includes a description, glossary, discussion questions, and pre-class worksheet.
This paper describes work from the Milstein group in which ruthenium catalysts with pincer ligands are used to depolymerize nylons by breaking the C-N bond and hydrogenating the resulting products to amines and alcohols. Waste plastic is a serious environmental concern that needs a solution. Organometallic chemists put significant effort into finding ways to convert monomers into polymers, and now we must figure out ways to do the reverse.