This is a short critical thinking exercise that I use to assess whether my students have understood where the d orbital splitting in Octahedral and Tetrahedral geometry comes from. I do it at the beginning of the class after we discuss CFT/LFT in Oh and Td compounds.
This is a truly hands-on activity in which students manipulate paper cutouts of carbon atomic orbitals and oxygen group orbitals to identify combinations with identical symmetry and build the carbon dioxide molecular orbital diagram. The activity pairs well with the treatment of MO theory in Miessler, Fischer, and Tarr, Chapter 5. An optional computational modeling component can be added at the end.
This is an in-class activity I made for my students in a Junior/Senior-level one-quarter inorganic course.
Unfortunately it was waaay too long for the 1.5 h class (i gave them about 45 min). I recommend taking this and adapting it to a take-home exercise or homework set, which is probably what I will do this coming year.
Students used Otterbein to look at various structures, starting with low symmetry, working up to very high symmetry structures. I had them go through the "challenge" so they couldn't see the keys at first, but then go back to check their answers.
This Learning Object involves reading a recent scientific journal article, answering questions relating to the content, and participating in a classroom discussion. The paper under review is “Regeneration of an Iridium (III) Complex Active for Alkane Dehydrogenation Using Molecular Oxygen,” Organometallics, 33, 1337-1340. DOI: /10.1021/om401241e).
Five slides about how to systematically determine the irreducible representation if provided an unlabeled SALC. These slides focus on molecular orbitals, but this tool can be extended to any kind of SALC.
At this website, you will find a link to the syllabus and all lecture videos for a "flipped" version of an Advanced Inorganic Chemistry Course taught at Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame, IN). I used Shiver & Atkins for this course, and the format is based off of Dr. Franz's course at Duke. If anyone is interested in the problem sets, I will be happy to share, although much of the material I used is from VIPEr.
In this activity, students in my upper-level Inorganic course are given two possible structures of sulfur dioxide, and based on an assessment of given vibrational modes, they determine which of the modes are IR active by two methods: (1) the “Intro Chem” method (determing whether the dipole moment changes for a particular vibrational mode) and (2) using character tables. They compare their assessment to experimental IR absorption peaks, and the students decide which structure is valid. For those of you who teach Raman spectroscopy, it could be included in this LO as well.
In this activity, students will use gummies and toothpicks to construct models of molecules that will then be analyzed for their symmetry elements, and ultimately placed into the correct point group and the models can then be consumed.
In this activity, Introductory Chemistry students are given two possible structures of sulfur dioxide, and based on an assessment of given vibrational modes, they determine which of the modes are IR active (and thus, whether the molecule is a greenhouse gas). They compare their assessment to experimental IR absorption peaks, and the students decide which structure is valid.
Hilary first higlighted this resource as a news item before we had a web resource category. I'd like to bring it back to people's attention as a web resource because of its value.