A systematic study of both the fundamental principles and the descriptive chemistry needed to understand the properties of the main group elements and their compounds. (Three lecture, one recitation, and three laboratory hours per week) Prerequisites: CHEM 1200.
This article describes the synthesis and characterization of ternary rare-earth gallium bismuthide, LaGaBi
Inorganic chemistry is a branch of synthetic chemistry typified by its focus on compounds composed of elements other than carbon and hydrogen. But don’t let that fool you!
This activity is a guided approach to answering the following: "Give an example of a silver (Ag+) salt that is expected to be soluble in water." It requires students to consider both HSAB and Bronsted acid/base concepts when evaluating solubility.
I use the activity at the end of the unit on reactivity of ions in aqueous solutions, after we have gone over all of the relevant concepts, and the question (without scaffolding) is similar to what I might ask on an exam.
This activity is designed to give students practice with predicting the preferred direction of double displacement reactions using the hard-soft acid-base (HSAB) principle. It includes a question where students must determine the relative softness of two soft bases. This activity was used after the lecture where students were introduced to these concepts.
This activity is designed to serve two purposes. The first is to give students practice with assigning the acidity of cations (acidic or non-acidic) and the basicity of anions (basic, feebly basic, or non-basic). The second is to guide students to discover the general trends in solubility for combinations of Bronsted acids and bases. The thermodynamic underpinnings of these generalized "solubility rules" are taught in the subsequent lecture.
This is an in-class activity that I use in my advanced general chemistry course to teach students how to qualitatively assign oxo anions as non-basic, feebly basic, or basic. Being able to qualitatively make these assignments helps students when we get to predicting solubility of compounds using Bronsted acidity and basicity.
This is an in-class activity that I use in my advanced general chemistry course to teach students how to rank the relative acidity of monoatomic cations and how to qualitatively predict the strength of the interaction of these cations with water (hydration and hydrolysis).
This is an in-class activity that I use in my advanced general chemistry course right before I start teaching about the relationship between the Bronsted acidity of cations and their hydration/hydrolysis. This is the first topic in the course (reactions of ions in aqueous solution), and we would have just spent a lecture reviewing intermolecular forces.