I use this exercise in my 400-level Inorganic (Transition Metals) course.  Students have been introduced to assigning point groups in a 300- level Inorganic course on bonding theories.  Therefore, I combine a review of assigning point groups with the introduction to inorganic nomenclature in my advanced course.  This seems to break up the tedium of the rules for nomenclature while stressing that the need for such elaborate names comes from the need to correctly identify one structure among may isomeric possibilities.

I was taught (many years ago) the common misconception that fitting the linearized form of the Eyring equation overstates the error in the intercept because on a 1/T axis, the intercept is at infinite temperature, and the intercept is far from the real data. While researching various methods of data fitting, I stumbled across this great article from the New Journal of Chemistry (New J.

Several years ago I began using a set of Ligand-of-the-Week exercises in my Inorganic course to encourage (force) students to go outside of our textbook and into the chemical reference materials and chemical literature to find examples of ligands that bind to metal ions. My motivation was to get my students to see the wonderful breadth of known metal-ligand complexes and to develop skills associated with analyzing and classifying ligands. My original paper is fairly complete and can be accessed via J. Chem. Educ. which is now available through the ACS website.

This is an in class exercise that I use to introduce structure and magnetism to a junior/senior level course on bioinorganic chemistry. The class is cross-listed between Chemistry and Biochemistry. All of the students have had general chemistry and organic (with some exposure to MO Theory). Many of the students have also had the sophomore-level inorganic course, which delves extensively into MO theory, and some of the the students have also had the senior-level course on transition metal chemistry which looks deeply at d-orbital splitting.

For years, I spent 2-3 days a semester working through Tanabe-Sugano diagrams, their development from terms, their evolution from Orgel diagrams, their analysis to give transition energies (the old ruler- trial and error analysis) and nephalauxetic parameters.  Recently, colleagues in VIPEr convinced me that my time in class could be better spent, but I am not willing to completely give up on Tanabe-Sugano.