Do you want to show your students beautiful illustrations of atomic orbitals? My favorite place to go is the Orbitron, Mark Winter's gallery of AOs and MOs on the web. Not only can you see images, but you can link to different representations of the wave functions and electron density functions.
Flash is required for this site.
Hilary first higlighted this resource as a news item before we had a web resource category. I'd like to bring it back to people's attention as a web resource because of its value.
The resources on this website will help students learn concepts in materials chemistry, solid state chemistry, and nanoscience. The website provides links to
In the 2013 Inorganic Curriculum Survey, respondents were asked about the resources they used when they teach inorganic chemistry. About 20% of respondents selected "other" and provided information about these resources. A number of people mentioned specific websites. This collection consists of the websites submitted in the survey.
Frustrated by the lack of inorganic textbooks that really fit my materials-oriented first-semester inorganic course, I embarked on a project with my students to create a free online textbook. The students did most of the heavy lifting, and I'm pleased to report that the next class to use the book rather liked it. It is still a work in progress, but I would like to encourage everyone to check it out and edit it if the spirit moves you.
Asking students to work in groups and developing group projects is always challenging. This 5-slides about describes approaches for increasing the effectiveness and success of student groups. It also contains some helpful links to resources on how to form groups and help students develop group skills.
This community challenge was to come up with problems on solid state structures. Not exactly my area of expertise. In fact, I ofter turn to VIPEr for help when I teach this these topics. I think we received some really great contributions for this community challenge. I am honored to have co-authored a few of them with Maggie Geselbracht. I look forward to using the rest of these in my class in the future.
This in-class group activity provides several examples of varying difficulty for students to assign MLXZ classifications and electron counts to organometallic complexes. Though some of the problems are straightforward, some are really ambiguous, and the intent is for student groups to grapple with the issues raised by each one and present their findings to the class to spark further discussion.
This is a simple activity designed to help students visualize the interaction of atomic orbitals to form molecular orbitals. Students construct atomic orbitals out of Play-Doh and determine whether overlap of a given pairs of atomic orbitals along the specified axis can result in a σ, π, or δ interaction or no net interaction. I do this activity following a reading assignment and lecture on the formation of molecular orbitals from atomic orbitals that cover the various types of interactions. Students then work in groups of 3-4 to complete the instructions described on the attached worksh