This worksheet was designed to give students an introduction to organic chemistry nomenclature with a more active experience than listening to a faculty member present all the rules for how to name alkanes and cycloalkanes. The pedagogical approach is one introduced to me by Dr. Melonie Teichert; we refer to it as ICC (Inventing through Contrasting Cases). The theoretical framework involves the premise that students will learn and retain more of the learning if they're not simply told the "answer" but if they attempt to generate an answer for themselves based upon a data set.

After I teach my students about magnetism and magnetic properties in coordination compounds, I spend a day showing how the data is collected and analyzed. I teach them about the Gouy balance, the Evans method of determining magnetism by NMR, and SQUID magnetometry. I also show them real data that I collected as an undergraduate or graduate student, and have them interpret and analyze it.

The only experiment that we can do locally is the Evans method, so I spend more time on this technique. We use the method during the metal acac laboratory.

This in-class activity is designed to follow the linked lecture/demonstration on soapmaking. The soaps cure enough to be handled in 48 hours if kept warm, and the students can feel the difference in the canola/coconut oil soaps.

The calcuations go through the major reactions, functional groups, and physical properties of soap molecules, and ends with the calculation of molecular weight for a mixture of substances. This could be related to a later polymer unit.

Students are often presented with the finished MO correlation diagrams of molecules like bis benzene chromium or ferrocene in classes and in organometallic chemistry text books. This activity helps them match the ligand group orbitals of the two benzene rings with the metal valence orbitals. Their understanding and appreciation of such diagrams is significantly enhanced when they find out how only some matches have the appropriate symmetry requirements.

This is a short critical thinking exercise that I use to assess whether my students have understood where the d orbital splitting in Octahedral and Tetrahedral geometry  comes from.  I do it at the beginning of the class after we discuss CFT/LFT in Oh and Td compounds.