Chapter 2

Any questions on Chapter 2 material? Ask them here.

Mastering Chemistry assignments

I am getting the same question over and over again on the blog and by email, in addition to addressing it explicitly multiple times in class. Here is the answer again: the ONLY graded assignments are the graded quizzes. Their due dates are as follows:

Graded Quiz 1 - Chapter 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 – Due Wednesday September 18 
Graded Quiz 2 - Chapter 1.4 to 1.9 – Due Wednesday September 25
Graded Quiz 3 - Chapter 2 (all) – Due Wednesday October 9
Graded Quiz 4 - Chapter 3 (all) – Due Wednesday October 23
Graded Quiz 5 - Chapter 4.1 to 4.5 – Due Wednesday October 30
Graded Quiz 6 - Chapter 4.6 to 4.8 & Chapter 5 – Due Wednesday November 6
Graded Quiz 7 - Chapter 6 (all) – Due Wednesday November 27
Graded Quiz 8 - Chapter 7 (all) – Due Wednesday December 4

(taken directly from the course website).
EVERYTHING else is simply for practice, and is entirely optional and for your benefit only. Assigned homework will be reassigned at a later date so you can try it again for revision purposes.

Pencast experiment

I have a new gadget - a Livescribe Echo Smartpen. It allows me to record what I'm saying and what I'm writing. Typically, these are used by *students* to record their lecturer; I'm trying it out in reverse. I plan to record solutions to questions that students bring me during office hours, so for those of you who don't have the time can get the same teaching experience as those who do visit me. The explanations of particular problems will be delivered in the form of a playable pdf file, and in today's case, you can hear and see me solving a problem that asks how many photons of microwave radiation does it take to heat up a small cup of coffee. Feedback on how useful (or not!) you find this is most welcome; it's very much at the experimental stage.

Additional reading for Chapter 1

Here are some links you might find useful. In particular, the animated tutorials are a good learning aid; they come from a textbook called Chemistry - the Science in Context by Gilbert, Kirss and Davies and published by WW Norton.
- Tutorials: Electromagnetic Radiation | Light Emission and Absorption | Bohr Model | De Broglie Wavelength | Quantum Numbers | Electron Configuration
- Nobelprize.org has a great online resource called The Quantised World (you'll recognize some of the figures from the lecture book).
- an excellent, if somewhat long, tutorial from Physics2000, on the Quantum Atom. It goes on to Beyond the Hydrogen Atom.
- Check out the Orbitron, a gallery of atomic orbitals and molecular orbitals.
- Breaking Bad - Walt's science lesson
- Army of Darkness
- Chemistry.com
- Modern materials in the iPhone

Revision for labs

Some tutorials to help you brush up on the basics for your labs:

Significant Figures | Scientific Notation | Dimensional Analysis | Avogadro’s number | Balancing equations | Limiting Reactant | Molarity | Dilutions

The FULL ebook - the one you access through MasteringChemistry - also covers all this background, mostly in Chapters 1-4.

The drop-in center on the Elliott landing is a good place to go for help with labs. Here is a link to the schedule; go when Elvis or Monica  are there.

Robin Theron

... is the lecture TA associated with Chem101. You can meet her in the lecture drop-in hours, and she will periodically be commenting on this blog as RobinT. You can regard her answers as authoritative. You may have also noticed Sandy Briggs commenting under his own name, and as course coordinator, his word is of course law!

Chapter 1

Any questions on Chapter 1 material? Ask them here.