Teaching Strategies

Topic Strategy Title Description
Balloon Dance VSEPR

Use balloons to illustrate bonding pairs and electron pair repulsions leading to the determination of molecular shape For example, if you tie 6 balloons together, it automatically forms the octahedral shape. Then each time you pop one, they rearrange themselves to sequentially form the other...

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Electron Role Play

When teaching electronic configuration, if it's a small class you can get each student in the class to be an electron. They can arrange themselves in different directions. It's really good if you've got steps in your classroom because you can demonstrate going up in energy. They face towards the...

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Wave Function Simulations

For this particular topic, there are some quite nice simulations of wave functions and of orbitals and similar things on the web that can be used to visualise what orbitals look like, and what wave functions look like. They seem to like it.

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Demonstrate Molecular shape

Use models to illustrate shapes formed by molecules. Or use balloons to illustrate bonding pairs and electron pair repulsions leading to the determination of molecular shape You can show them a tetrahedron and an octahedron etc.

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3D Modelling Software

3D modelling software is very good. There are some Java Applets that show 3D visualisations of orbitals. You just select whichever orbital you want and you can rotate it and view it from different angles.

Link to Hydrogen Atom...

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