Education in organic chemistry is highly reliant on molecular representations. Students abstract information from representations to make sense of submicroscopic interactions. This study investigates relationships between differing representations: bond-line structures, ball-and-stick, or electrostatic potential maps (EPMs), and predicting partial…

Organic molecules are invisible objects, but they can be visualized and manipulated by using molecular models. The object-based learning (OBL) approach, which is an educational tool developed for museums and collection items, is tailored and applied to a first-year bachelor course of organic chemistry. At the beginning of the course, each student…

The great development of high-throughput molecular biology techniques and the consequent generation of massive data have made Bioinformatics essential for undergraduate Bioscience students. The importance of this scientific discipline is evidenced by the huge number of specialized publications, tools, and databases available. Training in…

A [beta]-lactam, the core structure unit of clinically important antibiotics such as penicillin and cephalosporin, is one of the most commonly encountered four-membered heterocycles in organic chemistry and is widely used in medicine and biochemistry. The Kinugasa reaction, a copper­(I)-catalyzed cycloaddition of a terminal alkyne with a nitrone,…

A deep understanding of organic chemistry requires a learner to understand many concepts and have fluency with multiple skills. This understanding is particularly necessary for constructing and using mechanisms to explain chemical reactions. Electrophilicity and nucleophilicity are two fundamental concepts to learning and understanding reaction…

This article presents computational chemistry exercises that are designed to be incorporated into an undergraduate physical chemistry course. This activity teaches computational chemistry as it is performed in higher-level research (in a command-line environment and executed on a high-performance computing cluster) to provide students with a…

Understanding organic reaction mechanisms can be a challenging task for many undergraduate students, particularly those who are nonchemistry majors, despite the fact that organic chemistry is a mandatory course for numerous science and engineering undergraduate programs. The selectivity of a reaction is largely determined by the distribution and…

The concepts taught in an undergraduate physical chemistry course are directly related to the molecular processes governing climate change, yet the connections between quantum mechanical molecular properties and global warming are rarely made explicit. To improve student knowledge about climate change, we developed a three-part activity that…

This study investigates students' cognitive resources for identifying symmetry elements using survey data collected from 39 inorganic chemistry students from twelve undergraduate inorganic classes at universities across the United States. We propose a framework that leverages students' knowledge of symmetry elements as a manifold of cognitive…

We present here two accessible ways for enhanced understanding of complex biological structures and their function in undergraduate Biology and Biochemistry classrooms. These methods can be applied for in-class instruction as well as for remote lessons, as they are cheap, easily available and easy to implement. LEGO® bricks and MERGE CUBE based…

Using crystal structure data, site directed mutagenesis, and real-time kinetic assays, students designed, expressed, and purified engineered mutants of human insulin-degrading enzyme (IDE). Students designed their own IDE mutants following "in silico" analysis, used inverse PCR to generate mutant plasmid expression constructs, expressed…

Representations are ubiquitous in chemistry. They are part of the chemistry language instructors use to communicate chemistry phenomenon to students. Literature calls in support of learning with multiple representations, but there is a pre-requisite for students to learn from a single representation. In this exploratory study, 1086 students in…

We report a molecular modeling study for undergraduate students aimed at carrying out an analysis of small molecules using a systematic conformational search with VEGA ZZ, a freely available software program. Conformational analyses were performed using a systematic search based on variations of torsion angles. First, the conformations of n-butane…

Catalysis and catalytic cycles are widely used in both research and industry. The addition of a catalysis experiment into the undergraduate laboratory curriculum is important and necessary training to expand student learning. Here, an experiment demonstrating iron-based tandem catalysis was developed and implemented in an organic chemistry course…

Most biology undergraduates learn about mutations in multiple classrooms throughout their college career. Understanding personalised genome test results, genome editing controversies, and the appearance of new variants of viruses or antibiotic resistant bacteria all require foundational knowledge about mutations. However, the abstract nature of…