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 group activity I developed for my "Introduction to Chemistry" class, which is set up primarily to cover the topics we consider to be prerequisites for the first course in our chemistry sequence at Carleton. However, it covers aspects of thermodynamics (e.g., particularly Hess's Law) that are core topics for most intro courses.
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 discussion based on an interesting Bergman/Arnold paper utilizing d2 niobium imido complexes for the semihydrogenation of arylalkynes to Z-alkenes. The mechanism is quite unusual, and I found it to be an interesting paper to discuss after we had talked about the classical hydrogenation mechanisms (typically observed for late transition metals). The students should come into the discussion understanding fundamental reaction mechanisms (including σ-bond metathesis), and it's helpful if they are somewhat familiar with mono- and dihydride mech
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.
This paper is from a Science article from Alan Goldman’s group at Rutgers University. It was one of the literature articles that was assigned during the IONiC VIPEr Workshop in July 2012. In conjunction with reading the article, workshop participants attended a seminar presented by Alan Goldman on this work.
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
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.
The synthesis of the nitrogen triiodide ammoniate shock-sensitive explosive is a simple laboratory exercise, but it does require a lengthy time for the material to dry before it is active. This activity uses that time to have students investigate some simple thermodynamics behind their explosive, as well as consult the literature on high energy density materials from the work of Karl O. Christe.
There is also a shorter version of the activity posted as an in-class activity that omits most of the literature investigation.