Students in a sophomore-level inorganic chemistry course were asked to read the paper “High-Pressure Synthesis and Characterization of the Alkali Diazenide Li2N2” (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 1873-1875. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201108252) in preparation for a class discussion. For many students, this was a first exposure to reading the primary literature.
At this website students can access interactive game-like learning resources that cover a wide range of topics in general chemistry. These learning activities, which are in the form of flash cards, quizzes and matching games, will help student learn and review/drill important general chemistry topics.
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.
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.
Recent versions of Wolfram's Mathematica software have access to a variety of curated data sets that are relevant to Chemists. This activity is an example of how one can use the ElementData dataset to develop an on-line tool to explore periodic trends. Wolfram provides a free web-based platform (the FreeCDF plugin) to view and interact with specifically designed Mathematica files. The activity can be accessed in one of three ways:
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 excercise I used in my upper-level organometallic course to guide students through some of the important points of a detailed organic/organometallic paper. I have found that the first hurdles in some of these papers involve getting students to the point where they can understand (a) what specific reaction is being performed, and (b) what the role of each reagent is. This set of questions includes a mix of material, including some things that are specifically stated in the article and some that are implied or referenced elsewhere. I found that excercises like this one
The periodic table video website was developed by a group from the University of Nottingham. In addition to the link to the website there a link to a publication in Science on the website is included below. This is a great website that has a periodic table hyperlinked by element to a you tube video on that particular element. On any given element video you see a mixture of general properties of the element (lecture) and an experiment that shows the element. In addition, a new subheading has been added at the top for molecular videos where (a somewhat random yet interesting) list of mole
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.