A Virtual Chemistry Lab

Roberto Ma. S. Gregorius
Pan American University
Edinburg, Texas

Greg has another Flash lab for us to look at, it is over 500 KB so you may have a wait if you are using a telephone modem. The models imply an artistic background.

Note to CONFCHEM participants: The virtuaLab you are about to see is part of my effort to develop a General Chemistry I lab manual that includes concept tutorials, report–writing tutorials (both in Flash), videos of techniques, and a printed/electronic lab manual that is less spoon–feeding than the average manual. There is a minimum of things you ought to be aware of as you go into the virtuaLab: oval high–lights are indicative of a “click–able” item, direction high–lights (4 arrows) indicate that the item can be “click–hold and dragged”, and lastly, all items must first be dragged to the table top before it becomes useable in a virtual experiment. As for the rest, explore, enjoy, and let me know what you think.

FrameMaker for Lab Manuals

Patty Feist

Lab Coordinator, Organic Chemistry
Teaching Labs at CU Boulder.

Patty is back with a review of Adobe FrameMaker for large sized projects. The problems she relates with using large documents in the usual word processor strikes a cord with me and probably with most of us. Included are a number of suggestions that should make handling complex documents easier in any program.

"He showed me a few documents that he had prepared in Frame. Wow, his figures stayed where he wanted them. He had complete freedom in placement of text and figures. All of the figures were numbered, and he could refer to them by number and/or page in the text;
if he changed the order of the figures, the references to them changed correspondingly. I was impressed."

Using Interactive VRML to Teach Organic
Reaction Mechanisms

Steven P. Wathen
Division of Mathematics, Computing and the Sciences
Siena Heights University
Adrian, MI 49221

Steve has an interesting, interactive way to make organic mechanisms clearer. Note it requires VRML plugins to use the mechanisms.

"In my classes, I have used the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)(1) to help students visualize how reactions occur....VRML was designed for the distribution of three-dimensional “world” files on the internet...Many reactions also have a three-dimensional component and it takes some training to really appreciate the information

Evaluating Search Engines for Chemistry - III

pencehe@oneonta.edu

Harry has some new results in his search for the perfect search engine, Now if he can just improve the quality of the pages I find.

"...As noted in the previous article in this series, there are at least three important criteria that should be used to evaluate search engines: comprehensiveness, currency, and efficiency. ...Which is the best search engine for chemistry? There have been a number of claims that one engine oranother has met or surpassed Google, but ." .read on