In my senior level inorganic lab, I've tried to incorporate full semester research projects.  Since I love synthesis, I have tended to assign synthetic projects.  Students have learned a lot during these experiences, but there are the obvious challenges of multistep synthetic work in a 3 hour a week lab. I'd like to try to develop projects that are more mechanistic in nature, but am struggling to come up with ideas that are both compelling and achievable.  We will be working in lab this spring with social distancing and some restrictions, but should be able to do all the things we normally

Over the last few years, my colleague Steffen Berg and I at UiT - The Arctic University of Norway have developed a new approach to teaching descriptive inorganic chemistry based on organic-style arrow pushing. The approach has been shown to work well for main group chemistry. Two articles have been published in the Journal of Chemical Education illustrating the approach for both simple and rather complicated main group reactions: