Students work individually, then compete in teams, to identify symmetry elements and operations present in a high-symmetry structure, such as an octahedron or tetrahedron (without showing the character table until the end of the activity).  Students often  visualize symmetry elements differently from one another.  Creating teams, allows them to work collaboratively, and the competition adds an incentive for finding the most elements.  Since some students are better at seeing some symmetry elements (and operations) than others, it allows for them to work in small groups to both teach and lea

All chemistry is learned best by "doing," and I believe this is especially true for determining molecular symmetry.  This activity was designed to end a three-part lecture/activity on symmetry and point groups for my advanced inorganic class.  I call this unit on symmetry a lecture/activity series because it was designed to be student-guided learning and requires the students to teach each other how to determine a molecular point group.  I only gave one formal lecture on symmetry and point groups, which was followed by the symmetry scavenger hunt activity LO.  Finally this assignment was do

In this activity, students construct molecular orbital correlation diagrams for several species (H₂, He₂, HeH), in a semi-quantitative fashion using a ruler and a list of first ionization energies.  All the MO schema are placed on a common energy scale, and the stability of each orbital is reported using "cm from the top of the paper" as the unit of energy.