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
Students are asked to find a coordination complex in the recent literature and analyze its structure. This homework or in-class activity is a great way for the instructor to crowd source the discovery of interesting new complexes to use as material in future exams.
I like having students look at data and then explain data based on what they know about periodic trends. This activity uses the data we all use for radii and ionization energies and asks students to look just a little bit deeper.
I have gone back and forth between using this as an in class activity (my current practice) and using some of these questions on exams.
In this exercise, students are introduced to Mercury, a program for visualizing and analyzing crystal structure data. Students are guided through opening the program for the first time and viewing a structure from the Teaching Subset, a selection of structures from the Cambridge Crystallographic Database (CSD). Activites include changing the representation of the complex, moving the structure around the window, accessing information about the structure, and measuring bond lengths and angles within the structure.