Chemistry course support

High school - college level

Chemistryland "A fun place to learn chemistry" - this colorful, visually interesting and quirky site by Ken Costello is worth viewing if only to marvel at its originality.

Chalkbored - a set of worksheets, handouts, PowerPoints, and comments by Jeremy Schneider, directed mainly at high school Chem 11-12.

{Wilton High School Chemistry page} (Bob Jacobs). Titled "ChemistryCoach", this is an exceptionally comprehensive high school site. There are a large number of tutorial pages (of varying quality), as well as links to experiments, worksheets, demonstrations and lesson plans. (Link is to last archived update, 6/2007.)

{Audrey Sanderson's Chemistry Resources} - a nicely-organized and annotated list aimed at high school level. (What became of Audrey? The link broke in 2005, but this archive still seems to work.)

{Aufbau1} - A remarkable, extensive and somewhat unconventional on-line resource by Roger Peters. It includes tutorials in student and teacher versions (the latter with detailed answers and constructed graphs), Teacher's Notes, and even a dramatic work. Although aimed at British middle-school students, this will likely be more suitable for high school and college students in North America.

ChemistryCoach is a high school course support page of encyclopedic proportions. Authored by Bob Jacobs of Wilton High School, this well-organized site contains hundreds of links that will be of interest to students and teachers. Among the latter is an extensive page of links to lesson plans.

The Chem Team - a high school chemistry course by John Park.

ChemTutor - a collection of materials by David Wilner. "Basic chemistry help is available here for high school or college students. Chemtutor begins with the fundamentals and gives expert help with the most difficult phases of understanding your first course in chemistry. Chemtutor is not necessarily a complete text for your course or a complete outline, but we are proud to offer some insightful help in the parts of primary chemistry that have been, from our experience, the hardest for students to grasp. "

College-university level General Chemistry

BestChoice, a Model for Interactive Web-Based Teaching - an article by Sheila Woodgate and David Titheridge of the University of Aukland describing an open-access interactive site that was developed initially to support learning in large first year Chemistry classes. More recently BestChoice has been expanded to provide learning opportunities for a wider ranger of users. The model underpinning BestChoice learning activities is simulation of the interchange of a student with an experienced teacher. Thus student responses on BestChoice question pages generate instant assessment and feedback. BestChoice is innovative in its emphasis on teaching both concepts and problem-solving strategies by guiding students in ways that promote their understanding.

California State Univ - Dominguez Hills Lecture Help Pages - An extensive set of exercises covering a variety of topics and involving Web-based drill, word problems and data analysis. (George Wiger)

ChemistryLand - this visually-striking site (apparently by Ken Costello) provides support for several courses at Maricopa Community College.

Concepts of Chemistry - this on-line textbook for the Chemistry course at Worcester Polytechnic Institute by Nicholas Kildahl is far more detailed than the brief outline-type summaries so often found on the Web.

General Chemistry - a Virtual Textbook by Michael Blaber of Florida State U., 1998. {First-semester} and {Second-semester} Coverage. Similar note collections for several Biochemistry courses are also available at the same site. (Links are to last archived updates, 9/2007.)

Introductory University chemistry - these are the excellent sets of notes for now-retired Prof. Jim Plambeck's two-semester course at the University of Alberta. These archived versions were removed from archive.org's collection at UA's request some years ago, but lo and behold, they have turned up at this UK site! Unfortunately, some of the illustrations are missing.

{MIT Biology Hypertextbook} has a {Chemistry Review) section covering chemical bonding, pH, organic functional groups, stereochemistry, and some review problems. Note: this site has been withdrawn as explained here. The above links are to the last 2006 archived version, but the last update was in 1993.

ChemThreads is a very elaborately constructed course support site for first-year Chemistry at U. Arizona. The sections related to laboratory work are especially interesting.

First-year chemistry lecture notes by Michael Mombourquette of Queens University in Canada.

John Denker's page of physics notes, many of which relate to chemistry

Ralph Logan's home page is especially valuable for its links to sources of distance education, chemistry faq's, and Web page construction.

Sheffield Chemputer web site contains on-line calculators covering isotope patterns, reaction yields, element percentages, VSEPR shapes, oxidation state of d-block metals in a complex, electron counting for metals in a complex, MLXZ.

Thall's Website - lots of interesting stuff from Edwin Thall of Florida Comm. College

{UC Berkeley Digital Chem 1A Lab Manual} profides an interesting example of integrating technology into a large-enrollment course. It "seeks to make the extensive online course materials used to teach General Chemistry at UC Berkeley freely available to the large online community." (Withdrawn: link is to April 2007 archive.)

see also: Digital Chem1a Study: Costs, Culture, and Complexity: An Analysis of Technology Enhancements in a Large Lecture Course at UC Berkeley. As is usually the case with even the richest institutions, this project seems to be dependent on external support from NSF and other sources.

Univiversity of Illinois General Chemistry site - an exemplary support site.

UNC Chapel Hill Chemistry Fundamentals Course - contains fairly good surveys of the topics it covers, and offers on-line pre- and post-tests.

Virtual Chembook - a nicely-done site by Charles Ophardt of Elmhurst College covers a wide swath of general, organic, and environmental chemistry. All the pages have a similar format, with text in one column and illustrations (usually very good ones) at the side. The text material is interesting and well written without attempting to be encyclopedic.

Chemistry blogs, lectures and podcasts

Michelle Francl of Bryn Mawr College has an engaging and insightful series of commentaries relating to selected first-year Chemistry topics, and on The Culture of Chemistry ("the who, what, when, where and why of chemistry.")

UC Berkeley offers webcast/podcast archives of lectures in certain courses, including the first-semester course Chem1a.

Chemistry video podcasts on many topics by Richard Meagher of Mt Lawley Senior High School.

MIT Open CourseWare Chemistry site contains lecture notes and in some cases video lectures for a large number of undergraduate and graduate courses.

Laboratory course materials

Analytical Sciences Digital Library - This NSF-sponsored site contains links to a variety of materials relating to analytical chemistry, including Web pages and lab manuals for individual courses.

Dartmouth ChemLab - An exeptionally well-done lab course support site which features links to specific instruments and techniques such as pipetting, use of a balance, spectroscopy, and chromatography, all containing excellent photographs and illustrations. The pages relating to specific experiments provide quick access to information on pre-lab preparation, safety, and nature of the write-up required for each experiment.

{Lab Archive clearinghouse} at Everett Community College is an extensive, searchable collection of experiments for all levels. Contributions of new experiments and ratings of existing experiments are solicited. There is also a user forum for lab-related discussions. Although this site is no longer active, most of the links in this archived version still work.

LateNiteLabs offers Reactor, a Web-based laboratory simulation package that allows students to carry out virtual-hands-on experiments, either as pre-lab exercises or as a major part of distance-education courses.

UC Berkeley "Digital Lab Manual" - a good example of a comprehensive collection of pre-lab tutorials to support a laboratory course.

Virtual ChemLab is a set of sophisticated and realistic simulations for high school, freshman, and sophomore level chemistry classes. It is being developed at Brigham Young University.

Microscale lab experiments compiled at U. Nebraska - Lincoln

Doing Chemistry experiments and demos - another UNL collection, this one developed through an ACS/NSF-sponsored project.

Microscale Gas Chemistry experiments - a well-organized compendium of safe experiments on 13 different gases, using 60-cc disposable syringes. (Bruce Mattson. Creighton Univ.)

The visual organic chemistry laboratory. (Dan Straus, San Jose State U.) By using visual methods, i.e. photos and short animations, students gain visual familiarity with various organic chemistry lab techniques and set-up. It is recommended that this information be reviewed before the beginning of each lab period.

Instrumentation modules developed at U. Michigan - Dearborn provide pre-lab information on topics such as use of automatic pipettes, atomic absorption, gas chromatography, etc.

Basics of scientific glassblowing - detailed instructions and information compiled by Joseph Walas of East Carolina U.

DVAction is a database of digital video and images comprised of techniques and equipment used in the general chemistry laboratory. It is a free resource designed for instructors to aid in the development of multimedia materials for their courses.

Analytical Chemistry Role Playing Experiments - a set of downloadable project instructions by John P. Walters.

Chemistry course support sites