We have developed a set of icebreaker activities that could be used at any course level, either in an online video chat or in a classroom. These are based on the popular Mad Libs game in which some words are left out of a story and players are asked to provide words to fill in the blanks without knowing much about the story. We've provided an introduction to the game, definition of typical parts of speech that are requested (ie, adverb, noun, adjective, etc), and three starter activities.

In 2019, the journal Inorganic Chemistry updated it's scope (https://pubs.acs.org/page/inocaj/about.html).  This updated scope inspired me to update my first day of class activity for Inorganic (which was typically a version of the excellent first-day LOs from VIPEr).  

I asked students to read the journal scope (web link or hard copy provided) and answer a few questions in small groups:

The reciprocal interview is a first day of class strategy described by Hermann and Foster,¹ centered around changing classroom norms. The instructor begins by interviewing students about their goals and expectations for the course, before later turning these around as reasonable expectations of the students. In essence, this is a strategy to invite students to think about the course in a business-like environment, and view their expectations and the instructor expectations as originating from the same set of motivations.

I have taught the book Uncle Tungsten: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks in my Inorganic Chemistry course for juniors and seniors for a decade, but the way I teach the book has dramatically changed in recent years.

The book is a (somewhat nostalgic and bittersweet) recollection of Sacks' childhood and his early experiments in inorganic chemistry, and initially we read it on that basis. However, Sacks also talks (even in the first chapter) about his family's identities as "people who do science" and his identity as a Jewish child in 1940s Britain.

I developed this short class component in response to reading Saundra Yancy McGuire’s book, “Teach Students How to Learn.”  One chapter focuses on the importance of mindset, a concept developed by Carole Dweck. Students with a growth mindset believe that they can learn how to learn challenging material, while students with fixed mindsets believe that ability is innate and unchangeable.