Virtual and interactive course in coordination chemistry

Keywords: Coordination chemistry, virtual chemistry.

In our Institution, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Bogotá, there has been an important development of the Virtual University Program, which has made available online several courses covering all fields of knowledge from Bachelor Degrees, Specializations and Master Degrees. One of the most successful courses in the Program is the virtual course for Coordination Chemistry. This is due to the interactive nature of the course and the use of tools that allow the students to explore and manipulate dynamic 3D content, enhancing their opportunities for study and learning.

The course works mainly by utilizing the tool Spartan® [1] to draw coordination molecules and the JavaScript library JSmol [2] to render them in any modern web broser. The rendered molecules are therefore brought to life through this technology, which enable students to rotate or translate them, among other functionalities. In this way it is possible to observe and understand even subtle characteristics in the most complicated molecules.

[RhCl(PPh₃)₃]

[CoCl₃(NH₃)₃]

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor O. Lezama, who was the director of the Virtual University Program when we started the development of our interactive courses, for all his support during those initial stages of this work.
Computer Science professionals Rodolfo Hernández and Saul Figueroa deserve a special mention for their hard work in the design and development of the first version of our courses.
We would also like to highlight the work of the company Slabcode S.A.S, who were responsible for improving the overall design of the courses and updating (2017) the required technologies for their proper rendering and visualization.
We also thank the engineer G. Amaiz for transferring the Flash source code, no longer available, to current languages (2021) for the proper functioning of the courses.