<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.

This exercise introduces students to many chemical resources found on the internet.  Rather than being geared for upper-division chemistry majors, much of the material introduced is appropriate for freshmen and sophomore level students (although more advanced students will also benefit from the exercise).  The “web guide” contains links to many search engines and resources with brief descriptions of each while the “web report” has a number of exercises that asks students to search for chemical information.  The assignment is self-guided; students are encouraged to choose topic of interest t

Many extended structures can be viewed as close-packed layers of large anions, with the smaller cations fitting in between the anions. Larger holes between close-packed anions can hold cations with octahedral coordination. Smaller holes between close-packed anions can hold cations with tetrahedral coordination. The online jsmol resources show these layers and their holes.

In this in-class activity, students will determine the formal oxidation state of transition metal complexes by performing bonding type analysis of ligand−metal bonds. This in-class project is intended for those with little background in inorganic chemistry and aims to provide simple methods to calculate the formal charge of transition metals through bond-type analysis. While there are more sophisticated models already available to assign transition metal oxidation states, such as the LXZ (CBC) model, this exercise is intended for students who are coordination chemistry novices.

This activity was adapted from the J. Chem. Ed. article, “Discrepant Event: The Great Bowling Ball Float-Off.” In this activity students use a bowling ball and some basic materials to predict whether the ball will sink or float in a tub of liquid.