The Extremely Explosive Carbonyl Diazide Molecule

Submitted by Maggie Geselbracht / Reed College on Sat, 03/19/2011 - 17:03
Description

This Lewis structure and VSEPR problem is based on a paper from Inorganic Chemistry in 2010 reporting the crystal structure of the carbonyl diazide molecule.  This relatively simple molecule provides an interesting application of the predictive powers of Lewis structures and VSEPR theory to molecular structure, backed up by experimental data on bond distances and bond angles.  Before tackling carbonyl diazide, the students warm up by considering the structures of hydrogen azide and the isolated azide ion.  The reference to the original paper is

hybrid orbitals for main group and transition metal complexes

Submitted by Adam Johnson / Harvey Mudd College on Tue, 03/08/2011 - 22:58
Description
This handout shows how the s, p and d orbitals of appropriate symmetry can mix in Cnv and Dnh point groups (n = 3-4). A high-level Gaussian calculation serves to "back up" my "back-of-the-envelope" drawings of some of the hybrid orbitals.

The organometallic hypertext book

Submitted by Madeleine Schultz / Queensland University of Technology on Mon, 09/06/2010 - 06:11
Description

I am sure most people already use this but I always refer to students to the Organometallic hypertext book. It has excellent explanations of topics such as back-donation in organometallic complexes.

http://www.ilpi.com/organomet/

First Isolation of the AsP3 Molecule

Submitted by Anne Bentley / Lewis & Clark College on Fri, 09/03/2010 - 13:47
Description

Early in 2009, Christopher Cummins’ group at MIT reported (in Science) the synthesis of AsP3, a compound that had never been isolated at room temperature.  Later that year, a full article was published in JACS comparing the properties and reactivity of AsP3 to those of its molecular cousins, P4 and As4.  The longer article is full of possibilities for discussion in inorganic chemistry courses, with topics including periodic trends, NMR, vibrational spectroscopy, electrochemistry, molecular orbital theory, and coordination chemistry.

Medicinal Applications of Organometallic Compounds

Submitted by Sibrina Collins / College of Arts and Sciences at Lawrence Technological University on Sat, 07/17/2010 - 14:51
Description
This learning object focuses on concepts of bioorganmetallic chemistry. I use an article published in Chemical and Engineering News (Dagani, R. “The Bio Side of Organometallics,”Chem. Eng. News, 2002, 80(37), pp 23-29) to introduce students to this field. This activity consists of two components, namely writing a two-page summary of the article and using an in-class activity focused on the concepts of geometry, Crystal Field Theory (CFT) and proposing a mechanism for an overall chemical reaction.

Electron Counting

Submitted by Adam Johnson / Harvey Mudd College on Thu, 07/15/2010 - 14:05
Description

I use these two handouts early in my inorganic course to outline how to count electrons and assign ligand types in a metal complex.  I introduce it early so that I can use the terms "X" and "L" in class.  I come back to it and hit it again when I do my unit on organometallics. The "ligands" handout is my interpretation of the MLH Green paper from 1995 (Green, M. L. H., J. Organometal.

Molecular Origami: Precision Scale Models from Paper, by Robert M. Hanson

Submitted by Randall Hicks / Wheaton College on Tue, 06/29/2010 - 11:54
Description

This book called to me given my fascination with both origami and molecular model kits. While not a textbook in the true sense, the content of the book is pertinent to topics of molecular structure and symmetry and is therefore potentially valuable in both general and inorganic chemistry courses. In addition to the plans for constructing all the models (~125), there is a small amount of background information. Granted, many of these models could more easily be made using traditional model kits, but I had fun building them from paper.

Video explanations and practice problems of basic chemistry and math topics

Submitted by Lori Watson / Earlham College on Wed, 02/24/2010 - 15:34
Description

This is a website which links to a wide variety of good quality YouTube mini-lectures on basic topics in chemistry, mathematics, physics and a variety of other sciences.  Each video is about 10 minutes long and many go through example problems slowly and completely.  

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