In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, instructors across the world faced the uncertainty and challenge of retaining student engagement after transitioning from face-to-face to emergency remote instruction. Yet, few studies have evaluated student interest and motivation in the various learning formats during emergency remote learning…

The use of symmetry is widespread in chemistry, as it is used for predictions of the number of allowed and forbidden absorptions in electronic, vibrational, and rotational spectroscopies; for predictions of the combination of atomic orbitals to produce molecular orbitals; and in many other chemical applications. One critical step in these…

This article contrasts the normal method for drawing Lewis structures with a two-step systematic approach. The latter approach uses a known molecular connectivity and a knowledge of the number of valence electrons that each atom possesses to visualize bonds that are formed by pairing electrons, one from each atom. This process is repeated until at…

UC Merced's upper-division analytical chemistry course has been modified to include a series of Jupyter notebooks intended to introduce chemistry students to the Python computer language. These Jupyter notebooks were designed to cover a wide variety of topics common to quantitative and instrumental analysis. Assuming no prior programming…

The "Yet Another extended Hu¨ckel Molecular Orbital Package" (YAeHMOP) has been merged with the Avogadro open-source molecular editor and visualizer. It is now possible to perform YAeHMOP calculations directly from the Avogadro graphical user interface for materials that are periodic in one, two, or three dimensions, and to visualize…

Field trips are a common activity for instructors to engage students and give them a first-hand understanding of a subject, especially in environmental chemistry. However, the planning and execution for a field trip is logistically challenging and demanding of human and material resources. Here, we demonstrate the conduct of a virtual overseas…

"Complexation TOPOS" is a free software package to generate 3-D topographic surfaces ("topos") for metal-ligand complexometric titrations in aqueous media. It constructs surfaces by plotting computed equilibrium parameters above a composition grid with "volume of ligand added" as the x-axis and overall system dilution…

In this technology report, a tool is provided for teaching reciprocal space to undergraduates in physical chemistry and materials science courses. Reciprocal space plays a vital role in understanding a material's electronic structure and physical properties. Here, we provide an example based on previous work in the "Journal of Chemical…

Teaching the molecular aspects of drug-target interactions and selectivity is not always an easy task. In this context, the use of alternative and engaging approaches could help pharmacy and chemistry students better understand this important topic of medicinal chemistry. Herein a 4 h practical exercise that uses freely available software as a…

Box-and-whisker plots or simply boxplots are powerful graphical representations that give an overview of a data set. In this work five different examples illustrate the applications of boxplots in food chemistry. The examples involve relative sweetness of sugars and sugar alcohols with respect to sucrose, the potassium content of fruits and…

With the final objective of using computational and chemometrics tools in the chemistry studies, this paper shows the methodology and interpretation of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using pollution data from different cities. This paper describes how students can obtain data on air quality and process such data for additional information…

Hands-on exercises are designed for undergraduate physical chemistry students to derive two-dimensional quantum chemistry from scratch for the H atom and H[subscript 2] molecule, both in the ground state and excited states. By reducing the mathematical complexity of the traditional quantum chemistry teaching, these exercises can be completed…

Modern microcontroller boards offer the analytical chemist a powerful and inexpensive means of interfacing computers and laboratory equipment. The availability of a host of educational materials, compatible sensors, and electromechanical devices make learning to implement microcontrollers fun and empowering. This article describes the advantages…

Although many students learn best in different ways, the widest range of students can be reached when multiple modes of input are employed, especially if the student is simultaneously completing a set of handwritten notes. Computers, meanwhile, have led to countless changes in society, and education has not been exempt from these changes. Students…

The heterogeneous equilibrium of the solubility of calcium hydroxide in water is used to predict both its solubility product from solubility and solubility values from solubility product when inert salts, in any concentration, are present. Accepting the necessity of including activity coefficients to treat the saturated solution of calcium…