The organometallic hypertext book
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.
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.
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.
I teach my organometallics course, a junior/senior level half-course, entirely as student-led presentations of the primary literature. In the past, the course was populated almost entirely with seniors who had already taken a one-semester advanced inorganic course. This past year, I taught it to juniors and seniors, and the juniors had not taken inorganic yet. A description of the course first appeared in J. Chem. Educ. in 2007 (link below). This VIPEr learning object is an update of the original paper based on my experience over the past two years.
This is how I always end my organometallics unit in my advanced inorganic chemistry class. The students have already learned electron counting, the major reaction types (oxidative addition (OA), reductive elimination (RE), 1,1- and 1,2-insertion, β-hydrogen elimination, and [2+2] cycloadditions), and have gone through naming elementary steps in class for some classic catalytic cycles (hydrogenation with Wilkinson's catalyst and the Monsanto acetic acid process).
The Interactive Inorganic Challenge Forum is a resource for inorganic chemistry teachers who want to incorporate team learning questions (“Challenges”) into an upper level undergraduate inorganic course. Through this site, teachers can exchange their ideas with others who have used inorganic chemistry Challenges. As a result, students benefit from field-tested group questions.