For twenty years, I have started my second-year Inorganic Chemistry class with a few PowerPoint slides illustrating the inorganic chemistry that is present in a number of societal areas. The point is to emphasize to the students that inorganic chemistry is present in all aspects of life. To make this process more interactive, I made "game pieces" with a topic on the front (e.g, photography or radiation protection or vitamin B12) and an area on the back (energy, materials, biology, medicine, or environment). As each student enters the class, they are asked to take one game piece.

I do not like to take a large amount of time in class to cover nomenclature of any kind, though I want students to know the names of common ligands and the basic ideas of how coordination complexes are named.  Since it is a systematic topic I assign this guided inquiry worksheet.  I guess I think about it like learning rules for a new board game, sometimes you just have to play and learn as you go.  This assignment is meant to establish teh basica rules for naming by guiding students through what the needs are in naming, then it allows them to identify the convetions from a list of structur

Students will be given the formula for a cation or anion on a slip of paper or index card. He or she will find another student with an ion with the opposite charge and practice writing the formula and naming the ionic compound that would result by combining the cation and anion. Students also answer a few questions about naming and formulas of binary molecular compounds with their partner.

<p>This activity has students use Spartan to build an energy diagram for an SN2 reaction as a function of bond length. The activation energy can then be used to determine the rate constant for the reaction. After a few intoductory questions to orient general chemistry students to the organic reaction (with a short class discussion), the instructions lead them step-by-step to build the energy diagram for CH&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;Cl + Cl- --&gt; Cl- + CH&lt;sub&gt;3&lt;/sub&gt;Cl.

This is an HTML program that helps you spell with symbols of chemical elements for anything you want. Just cut and paste the text, paragraph or list of names you would like to "symbolize" in the left field. The program automatically displays the words that could be spelled with chemical symbols in the right field. When a word has more than one possible spelling, all of the possible combinations are displayed on a single line.