This website is a free and comprehensive resource that is a collection of open college courses that spans videos, audio lectures, and notes given by professors at a variety of universities. The website is designed to be friendly and designed to be easily accessed on any mobile device.
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 a literature-based activity that focuses on a review I recently published as part of a thematic series on C-H activation.
The review highlights similarities between the newly discovered frustrated Lewis pairs and polarized metal-ligand multiple bonds. There are many ways to use the review, but the attached set of questions focuses on drawing analogies among seemingly diverse types of reactivity using frontier-molecular-orbital considerations.
Determining the reactive intermediates in metalloenzymes is a very involved task, and requires drawing from many different spectroscopies and physical methods. The facile activation and oxidation of methane to produce methanol is one of the "holy grails" of inorganic chemistry. Strategies exist within materials science and organometallic chemistry to activate methane, but using the enzyme methane monooxygenase, nature is able to carry out this difficult reaction at ambient temperatures and pressures (and in water, too!).
This lecture provides a short introduction to the other half of biological iron chemistry: enzymes that do not contain a porphyrin group that ligates the iron atom. There are several important applications for non-heme iron in cells, both mammalian and bacterial. Oxygen activating non-heme iron enzymes fall into a few basic categories and includes mononuclear iron monooxygenases and dioxygenases, and binuclear iron monooxygenases. The requirements to activate and utilize dioxygen will be given.
This is a great web resource for all types of nano materials. There are lesson plans, demos, activites, labs and lots of background information. It is very easy to navigate and there are videos of the labs so you can see each step - very useful when doing a type of synthesis or technique new to you.
This is a literature discussion of a short JACS communication that describes an iridium catalyst for the reduction of bicarbonate to formate. It addresses green chemistry, potential industrial processes, bridges between homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, pH-dependent solubility, electron counting, oxidation state assignments, and thermodynamic analyses.
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.
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 activity is meant to teach students about the types of homogeneous transition metal C-H bond functionalization catalysts. Before class, the students will read a short discussion of inner- and outer-sphere C-H bond functionalization catalysts. Then they will use their knowledge of transition metal oxidation states and ligands in order to assess whether a variety of catalysts react via inner- or outer-sphere pathways.