Virtual and interactive course in simmetry in chemistry

Keywords: Simmetry, 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.

Molecular symmetry is a very interesting topic in chemistry. There are some properties that do not depend on the elements that form any given compound, instead they depend on their structure, particularly on symmetry. To elucidate structures in chemistry it is necessary to study their spectra ,specially the IR-, Raman and NMR spectra, and their explanation is only possible on the basis of symmetry.

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.

References

• [1] Spartan Homepage
• [2] Jmol and JSmol project site on Sourceforge
• [3] JSmol and Jmol Wiki site

Contact

Professor Arnulfo Poveda-Pinilla

apovedap@unal.edu.co

Departamento de Química, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Bogotá

You can browse the Help page to know more about JSmol and its interactions.

Notice: It's possible that some devices and low resolution screens don't display the dynamic molecules correctly. To solve this issue you have to use the zoom out function in your browser, if you're on Windows or Linux use the CTRL and - keys, and if you're on iOS use the ⌘ and - keys.