What do you think of starting a Wiki page "Jmol in the Classroom" -- or
perhaps, to be consistent, "Classrooms Using Jmol"
People could enter "teachable moments" when they used Jmol in an effective
way during class.
Here's a possible first installment:
Today, Day 5 of first-semester organic chemistry -- Textbook Smith, 3rd Ed.
-- Chapter 3 -- Topic "Functional Groups"
I thought it would be fun to get students to suggest examples, so I fired up
http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/docs/examples-12/simple.htm
(This page, as of this morning, has a new button on the right that uses the
PROMPT command in Jmol 12 and taps into the NIH Cactus service using LOAD
$chemicalName. Look in the page source for that very simple code.)
I just clicked on "Load MOL by NAME" and then asked them to give me a name
of something they knew, like a medication.
We ended up looking at diphenylhydramine, morphine, THC, heroin,
hydrocodone, adderall, and tetracycline, writing out several of these
structures on the board based on the 3D models. This lead to discussions of
reactivity, hints about the connections between names (even these trade
names) and functional groups, a little about the blood/brain barrier issue,
hints about synthesis (it's amazing how simple many of these drugs are).
Great fun.
Bob
--
Robert M. Hanson
Professor of Chemistry
St. Olaf College
1520 St. Olaf Ave.
Northfield, MN 55057
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr
phone: 507-786-3107
If nature does not answer first what we want,
it is better to take what answer we get.
-- Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lecture XXX, Monday, February 5, 1900
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