Interactive Chemistry Demos using Mathematica

Resource Title:

Technology Type:

Groupwork

Technology Tool:

Animations/Videos

Simulations/Case Studies

Pedagogical Goal:

Content delivery (alternatives to lecture)

Increasing engagement and/or interactivity

Course Type:

Lab

Academic Area:

Science, Technology, and Math

Discipline:

Chemistry

As part of an ongoing effort to revise and modernize the curriculum of the undergraduate quantum chemistry course (Chem461), Eitan Geva and colleagues have developed several innovative, interactive computer demonstrations. These color real-time animations were designed to bring the rather abstract equations of quantum mechanics to life allowing students to:

visualize the dynamics and investigate its dependence on various input parameters
gain invaluable physical intuition via active exploration
extend the range of problems that can be solved by incorporating numerical solvers

The interactive tools were created within the framework of Mathematica, but an easy‐to‐use user interface was designed, so no prior Mathematica programming experience is needed to use the demos.

50 demos have been developed, 25 of which have been accepted for publication on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project web site (http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/author.html?author=Eitan+Geva).