Counting Orbitals: Part II
A continuation of Counting Orbitals I: The 'Ah-ha! Moment' and Quantum Numbers. Sit back and adjust your eyeballs for some colorful graphics.
A continuation of Counting Orbitals I: The 'Ah-ha! Moment' and Quantum Numbers. Sit back and adjust your eyeballs for some colorful graphics.
Rajasree Swaminathan has developed a series of books that combines story-telling and visual representation of the elements as human characters. Along with hands-on activities, these books have created enthusiasm in her chemistry classes.
Doug Ragan been using magnets of elements and subatomic particles for some time to help his students visualize what is happening at the particle level of chemistry. Download the files attached to the post and print out your own set of elements and particles!
Light is a challenging topic in chemistry. In this article, I share an outline of how I approach the content related to interactions between matter and light using activities, a simulation, demonstrations and whiteboards.
College Board offers an excellent online resource for teachers and students. It's not free, but my school district pays the bill. AP Insight provides curriculum outlines, teaching ideas and resources, student handouts, and digitally-graded assessments.
Robert C. Rittenhouse
Walla Walla College, College Place, WA 99324
John C. Wright and Jon L. Holmes
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706
We’ve all seen and use the so-called Aufbau Diagram. It is a mnemonic used to remember the order of “filling” of atomic orbitals during the construction of the ground state electron configurations of the elements. The presentation of this diagram is largely disconnected from any physical meaning. Here’s what we tell our students: “Memorize the diagram, learn to use it, and you’re guaranteed to get the right answer.”
A complete understanding of why each element has a particular electronic configurations is a very complex subject. Even so, some confusion regarding the electronic configurations of the elements may be alleviated by looking at the physical properties of the electronic orbitals.
Have you ever wondered what is the theoretically largest possible value for the atomic number of an element? Using some introductory physics and algebra, you can get your students thinking about this idea.
Are kids learning? Given the time it takes to implement and grade the activity, do I get a lot of "educational moments" out of it? Does it fit into the culture of the classroom? Is there a great deal of "conceptually rich" material in the activity that students can build on? I believe that two activities I tried this week fit the bill.