Students use ChemViz as a web-based computational laboratory for designing experiments that can answer their questions concerning such abstract concepts as electrons, atoms, molecules and chemical bonding. By generating images of the electron densities for various combinations of atoms, students are able to understand in concrete terms the differences between equal and unequal sharing of electrons, bonding and antibonding orbitals, strong and weak bonds and the energy differences of atoms at appropriate and inappropriate bond distances and angles. In this workshop the presenters, four of whom are high school chemistry teachers, will discuss ChemViz as a teaching tool and lead participants through two short tutorials using the ChemViz tools. Participants will then use laboratory time to work through one or more self-paced tutorials. The tutorial topics will include atomic and ion sizes, atomic orbitals, bonding animations with energy curves, molecular orbitals, formic acid and the ionization of water.
Some teachers are speed boats, some are row boats, and some are rocks.
Many teachers would rather use a text book because it takes less time. Encouraging students to construct learning by asking questions just takes too much planning. You'll find the answers as a panel of of high school students, teachers, developers and instructors of Internet distance education courses discuss these and other thought provoking issues. Courses available on the Internet that deal specifically with using a variety of scientific image data will be discussed. Through its CoreModels project, the Maryland Virtual High School of Science and Mathematics has set out to determine if instructional activities centered around computational science models can help high school students achieve national and state science standards.