Green Chemistry

Submitted by Abby O'Connor / The College of New Jersey on Wed, 07/24/2013 - 16:51

I recently attended a workshop on green chemistry and shared with them this great web resource. My question to the group is how many of us incorporate green chemistry into our curriculum? In what ways is green chemistry incorporated, through lecture, lab or both? What sort of resources are people using for this? I plan to post some information from the workshop on the viper site when I have time. I am interested to see how many of us are teaching this to our students.

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General Chemistry: Taught in less than one full year

Submitted by Eric Watson / Seattle University on Fri, 07/12/2013 - 14:29

Hello,

I would be grateful to hear from college programs that teach less than one full year of General Chemistry.  At present, we teach 3 quarters of General Chemistry (Zumdahl and Zumdahl), a one quarter Fundamental Inorganic Chemistry (Rayner-Canham and Overton) and a one quarter Advanced Inorganic Chemistry (Shriver and Atkins).

We are exploring the possibility of shortening our general chemistry sequence to 2 quarters and then combining the topics usually covered in the third quarter into Fundamental Inorganic Chemistry course and other courses.

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Anyone have a GOOD gen chem lab on colligative properties?

Submitted by Cameron Gren / University of North Alabama on Thu, 07/11/2013 - 13:32
We do a freezing point depression experiment (naphthalene in cyclohexane from Beran), but it just doesn't work! We have cu down on the amount of solute, but the students just cannot obtain consistent data! I'm about ready to scrap it, but I would really like them to do SOMETHING with colligative properties in lab. Any suggestions would be most welcome!
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Novel instructional methods for studying the chemistry of main group elements?

Submitted by BoB LeSuer / The College at Brockport, SUNY on Wed, 07/10/2013 - 13:57

I am looking for some suggestions on innovative strategies for introducing the chemistry of main group elements to students.  Our Inorganic Chemistry class is a pre-pchem lecture and lab and I'll be using the 5th edition of Miessler/Fischer/Tarr.  (And a big thank you goes out to the authors, who have finally accepted to include at least a little bit of redox chemistry in the text.)  My issue arises with Chapter 8 (and the like), which in my opinion boils down to "read these sections, memorize these facts, quiz Monday".

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Geek Chic

Submitted by Benny Chan / The College of New Jersey on Mon, 07/01/2013 - 18:51

Howdy all,

Awesome time at the workshop this week.  We saw an abundance of awesome chemistry, inorganic related clothing.  

All of these websites were accessed on July 1

Maggie's super awesome d-orbital earrings were found on etsy, one pair left as of July 1, 2013 at 6:44 pm:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/92342046/quantum-physicschemistry-atomic-d

Two awesome heavy metal t-shirts:

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Sapling Learning Online Homework

Submitted by Sabrina Sobel / Hofstra University on Tue, 06/25/2013 - 10:09

I am planning to incorporate Sapling Learning online homework in my Foundations of Inorgnaic Chemistry class and my Advanced Inorganic CHemistry class. I've not used this program before, and am on the steep side of the learning curve. If you have an established course that I can adapt, that would be great. Also, I will be authoring questions as I need. Id love to crowd-source authoring of questions so that I'mnot just relying on my own perspective. Thanks!

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Symmetry or kinetics?

Submitted by Karen McFarlane Holman / Willamette University on Tue, 06/25/2013 - 10:06

I teach a one-semester upper-division course where, as we all know, tough decisions need to be made.  I have always taught symmetry, but it has become apparent that our students enter their senior year weak in kinetics, so I am considering swapping out symmetry/group theory for a more advanced treatment of kinetics and mechanisms.  This pains me, because these two topics are are two of my favories.  Then again, so is everything else...

Thoughts?

Karen

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Supplemental Instruction questions

Submitted by Joanne Stewart / Hope College on Wed, 06/05/2013 - 14:33

We are planning to pilot a Supplemental Instruction (SI) program in one of our general chemistry sections this fall (2013). We plan to use undergraduate supplemental instructors who will attend class and lead supplemental discussion sections for small groups of students. We are familiar with the literature on SI and we have some experience with PLTL, but we still are anxious about the logistics of setting this up.

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