This worksheet was designed to give students an introduction to organic chemistry nomenclature with a more active experience than listening to a faculty member present all the rules for how to name alkanes and cycloalkanes. The pedagogical approach is one introduced to me by Dr. Melonie Teichert; we refer to it as ICC (Inventing through Contrasting Cases). The theoretical framework involves the premise that students will learn and retain more of the learning if they're not simply told the "answer" but if they attempt to generate an answer for themselves based upon a data set.

A set of questions to intersperse in lectures OR to use as a means of student guided learning of nomenclature.

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.

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.

This is a fun chemistry project where students make model compounds to learn various structural aspects of the compound. This is an individual project that is each student is assigned with one compound.  They can use any item (for e.g. Styrofoam balls etc) to make their very own model compound. The model should contain all the atoms (visually distinctive), bonds, lone pairs. Student is expected to create something novel rather using molecular model kit. They can use text book and lecture material for the resources.