Flat, symmetrical molecules can be modeled by folding a sheet of paper, cutting patterns into the folded structure, and unfolding to produce the flat paper models. The finished models resemble paper snowflakes, but have a variety of rotational symmetries. Template patterns for several molecules are available for download in the Supporting Information.
Structure. Structure. Structure. This blog post describes a classroom activity where students propose the structure of a molecule- based on bond type information- used to accelerate the change in color of red table grapes.
Thin sheets of polystyrene can be patterned with permanent markers to represent repeating units of the polymer and then shrunk down in size using heat. The shrunken models of the repeating units can be connected with a string and then flipped into positions to demonstrate different types of polymer tacticity.
Who is not interested in food, right? Why not use what happens in the kitchen everyday to teach some chemistry? This blog post shares some conceptually based questions based on the information found on the backside of a popular dry mix brownie product.
Teaching about hypervalent structures is problematic. This post discusses a simple and quick way in determining the number of lone pairs on a hypervalent central p-block atom.
If you look at any chemistry textbook, you will see Lewis structures introduced long before electronic and molecular geometries. This makes sense since you need Lewis structures to determine molecular geometry. Unfortunately, research has shown that students often do not recognize that the purpose of drawing Lewis structures is not to create the structure itself but to use it as tool to understand the properties of the molecule (Cooper, Grove, Underwood & Klymkowsky, 2010).
