In this activity, students construct molecular orbital correlation diagrams for several species (H2, He2, HeH), in a semi-quantitative fashion using a ruler and a list of first ionization energies. All the MO schema are placed on a common energy scale, and the stability of each orbital is reported using "cm from the top of the paper" as the unit of energy.
This is the In Class Activity that I use to review the concepts of Lewis Dot Structures, LDS, (connectivity, resonance, formal charges, etc.) learned in General Chemistry and to introduce new ideas of resonance contributions to the character of the molecule. The question itself is apparently very simple, but the discussion that it produces can be quite rich and brings in both new and old ideas of LDS, providing both a good review and a good segue into advanced ideas of Lewis Dot Structures.
This is a literature discussion based on an interesting Bergman/Arnold paper utilizing d2 niobium imido complexes for the semihydrogenation of arylalkynes to Z-alkenes. The mechanism is quite unusual, and I found it to be an interesting paper to discuss after we had talked about the classical hydrogenation mechanisms (typically observed for late transition metals). The students should come into the discussion understanding fundamental reaction mechanisms (including σ-bond metathesis), and it's helpful if they are somewhat familiar with mono- and dihydride mech
This in-class activity and the related problem set allows students to discover the linear and bent bonding modes of NO to metals based on VSEPR theory through guided inquiry. Two examples follow which illustrate how the electrons are counted in NO complexes depending on the coordination mode/formal charge of NO. Students must have had prior practice in counting electrons of complexes to complete the problems.
ChemTube3D is a website maintained by the University of Liverpool that has interactive 3D animations ans structures. The content is broken up into several areas:
There is a lot of information on the site, and the information could be used in many courses. The areas that I find most useful in my sophomore-level inorganic chemistry course.
This paper is from a Science article from Alan Goldman’s group at Rutgers University. It was one of the literature articles that was assigned during the IONiC VIPEr Workshop in July 2012. In conjunction with reading the article, workshop participants attended a seminar presented by Alan Goldman on this work.
For many years I have resisted using clickers, mainly because at our university there is no standard universal clicker. I wanted to keep student costs as low as possible but also desired the type of live feedback during a lecture that clicker questions can provide. In both my general chem. (200-300 students) and upper division courses (50-75 students), I now pass out 4 or 5 colored notecards on the first day of class and make sure everyone has one of each color.
This is a powerpoint quiz show review that can be used to help students assess themselves on their level of understanding of simple bonding theory and some simple molecular orbital theory. It is appropriate for use in a general chemistry course or at the beginning of an advanced inorganic chemistry course to review simple bonding theory. It was developed as an alternative to using clickers for those departments that do not have clickers or would prefer not to set up clicker questions. Correct answers are shown at the end of each slide.
This learning object is a literature discussion based on a paper published in Nature (Labinger, J. A.; Bercaw, J. E. Nature 2002, 417, 507-514; doi: