We have a Junior Qualifying Exam at Reed, which in our department takes the form of an oral exam based on a recent paper from the primary literature for each student.  I just finished picking 4 papers for this year's crop of inorganic junior quals.  The students have 3 days to learn everything they can about the paper before the oral exam in front of 2 faculty.  Several of these choices were inspired by talks I heard at the ACS Salt Lake City meeting.

I use the framework molecular model set by Prentice Hall in my Inorganic class. 

I am about to put in my "book" order for the fall and I was wondering if anyone has found a better model set to use in Inorganic chemistry?  This set has trigonal pyramid and octahedral geometries. 

Kurt

Hi all,

On my inorganic exam last week, I wrote a question asking the students to construct a Born-Haber cycle to calculate the heat of reaction for the thermite reaction (nicely timed as our lab staff had just done the demo outside of our classroom for the Gen Chem students).  The data that I provided were the first three ionization energies for Fe and Al, the heats of formation for Fe and Al in the gas phase, and the lattice energies for Al₂O₃ and Fe₂O₃. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Barbara Reisner forwarded this YouTube link that she received via the Materials Science Department at Cambridge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oWp6ZNpxOo

Symmetry Challenge!
A contest across VIPEr, the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource.

Here is a chance to show your symmetry skills to all the inorganic chemists and students of inorganic chemistry on ionicviper.org!

Given a cube and 6 equal length lines how many objects of different point group symmetry can you construct?  All six lines must fit either edge to edge or vertex to vertex (it is ok to mix and match if you want), and each face must have one and only one line on it.

Oral presentations in Inorganic chemistry- Ligand of the week

I have had students in the past give short oral Element reports.  They are given the following guidelines:
1.  Where is the element found in nature (biology or geology)?
    2.  How is the element used in society? As an element or in a Compound, etc.
    3.  Show some balanced equations involving the element making or breaking bonds.
    4.  Show structures of  compounds including the element.
    5.  Show chemistry you think is particularly interesting.

Thanks to some guidance and support IONiC colleagues, I sat down to critically think about what I want students to learn from my inorganic courses before I wrote my syllabi this spring.  For the first time in 16 years of teaching (shamelessly admitted), I included course learning goals on my syllabi.  I thought it would be interesting to share these and compare to what other folks are doing.

I braved my son's 3rd grade classroom this week and brought in some dry ice and liquid N₂ demos to couple with their science unit on solids, liquids, and gases.  The kids LOVED it!  And 3rd graders are such a cheap thrill after cynical college students. 

Me:  So what do you think is going to happen when I put this balloon in the liquid N₂?

Kids:  IT'S GONNA EXXXXPLOOOOOOOOOOOOODE!!!!!!! (all of them covering their ears)