A series of videos has been produced to show students the best way to assemble glass jointware. A variety of different examples are provided, with variations that demonstrate some of the more complicated assemblies that are often used in inorganic synthesis (e.g., how to protect the system with a drying tube or to purge an apparatus with an inert gas). The intent of the videos is to provide visual learners with a better idea of what they must do in the laboratory, and thereby speed up the process of assembling glass jointware.
Videos include:
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).
This paper is a meaty communication that covers novel bonding of 4 e- π-donors to a 14-electron species. Requires students to apply their knowledge of electron counting and organometallic bonding to ligands that are acting in novel ways. This also includes exercises dealing with chemical information and general questions that require students to put the science in context.
This experiment is a computational supplement to Part B of the tin chemistry described in "Synthesis and Technique in Inorganic Chemistry" (Exp 7; see below for the complete citation).* Students will optimize and compute IR spectra for the cis and trans and corresponding linkage isomers of tetrachlorbis(dimethylsulfoxide) tin(IV). A comparison of experimental (IR spectra) and computational data (enthalpies of formation; IR spectra) will aid them in determining the most likely product of this simple synthesis and in identifying the S-O vibrations in their experimental spectrum.