This is a simple in class exercise to review acid- base equilibria and to lead the students to thinking about metals as both Lewis and Bronsted- Lowry acids. I use it as a discussion starter when I introduce the role of metals in biological acid/base chemistry in my upper division inorganic course, but it can be used at any level once acid-base equilibria has been covered.
A neat site that quizzes you on chemical symbols (e.g., Ag for silver), and donates rice for right answers. Hey, if students are going to learn chemical symbols, they may as well do it in a game setting, and many will find it a touch less pointless if they're doing someone else some good at the same time.
This website is a self-paced review of concepts for gen chem and includes test questions (and answers) for the reader. It would be a great site to point your intro chem students to if they want/need extra review. It is a set of 10 units, covering things like stoichiometry, unit conversions, and basic acid-base chemistry.
Theo Gray has compiled some of his Popular Science columns into a beautiful book of sometimes dangerous experiments, many of them with particular relevance to inorganic chemistry! With chapter names like "Experimental Cuisine", "Doomsday DIY", and "Twisted Shop Class", you know you in for a wild ride. Some particularly intriguing experiments include electroplating a copper design on your iPod, making glass and elemental silicon out of sand, making a burning Mg/dry ice sculpture, anodizing Ti for cool color effects, and creating a "hill billy hot tub" using 600 lbs of quicklime.
While this site is also a commercial site (selling Theo's periodic tables and book, etc.) it is a wonderful resource of pictures of elements and their compounds, and "real life" uses of elements (such as a gamma ray imaging of the skeleton for Tc, a hard drive for B, and sushi for Hg!). It is also a source of movies of reactions of the elements, including some pretty impressive ones for the alkali metals and the thermite reaction. It also provides easy access to his chemistry column for Popular Science magazine.
I developed this Jmol page to help my students see the relationship(s) between the ligands and metal d-orbitals in a number of different geometries. Since the images are all rotatable, students who have difficulty looking at flat images and drawing appropriate conclusions have that barrier reduced or eliminated. I have now used the application twice - this past fall in the second semester of introductory chemistry and a few weeks ago when I began ligand field theory in my inorganic course. In both classes I received favorable comments. A number of students in the inorganic course, who h
This web site contains a number of interactive spreadsheets, most of which are applicable to inorganic chemistry (or a physical chemistry class that uses inorganic examples). Here's the list of the most relevant for most inorganic classes:
ABC kinetics - interactively plot concentration versus reaction extent for A, B and C in A -> B -> C by varying k values
This is a handout which I use in an advanced general chemistry course, but which could be used in an inorganic course as well. It is a mini-periodic table with common cations and their charge to size ratios expressed as Q/r2, where Q is in integer charges (+1, +2), and r is in Angstroms. Conveniently, Na+ is an easy to remember 1.0, and Al3+ and Be2+ are easy to remember values of 10. This corresponds to the polarizing power of these ions, and is a crude proxy for how covalent their interactions with a given anion tend to be.
Students read Oliver Sacks' autobiography "Uncle Tungsten" and take turns writing chapter summaries and discussion questions. Some chapters focus on Sacks' childhood chemical explorations and others on the historical period of his youth. In the summary, students are asked to either explain the chemistry in contemporary terms OR explain the context (what was going on in the world) of the historical pieces.
It’s very surprising how little students remember from general chemistry. This assignment helps students make connections between the macroscopic properties of solutions and what happens at the molecular level. This activity serves as a bridge between sections on acid-base chemistry and coordination chemistry.
Students are solicited for their models of the behavior of different chemical compounds in water in class and asked to put these models on the board. We then look at the properties of these solutions (color, acid-base) and refine these models in class.