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.
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:
I learned of this website after attending the Computational Chemistry for Chemistry Educators (CCCE) workshop last summer '11. In this webpage you will find all the workshop lectures intended for audiences who do not have a computational expertise. You will also find lab exercises already written.
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.
ChemTube3D is a website maintained by the University of Liverpool that has interactive 3D animations ans structures. The content is broken up into several areas:
There is a lot of information on the site, and the information could be used in many courses. The areas that I find most useful in my sophomore-level inorganic chemistry course.
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 screencast is a brief introduction to some of the features of VIPEr.
Students in the courses I teach (primarily general chemistry) have struggled with understanding the three representations of matter: macroscopic, particle, and symbolic. This is particularly evident when these representations extend into reactions. Additionally, students struggle with understanding basic concepts of aqueous solutions and, by extension, reactions in aqueous solution. This activity is designed to help the students recognize different types of representations and then generate these for simple systems.