Saturday, October 04, 2008

Symmetry Scavenger Hunt

Last week, I had my chemistry students do a scavenger hunt on campus.  It was a blast!  They did so well too.  I was really impressed with them.  The class is Advanced Inorganic Chemistry so it's a small group of juniors and seniors.  We were talking about symmetry of molecules.  They had learned to do different things (operations) to a molecule (e.g. reflection, rotation, etc.).  Based upon those operations, a molecule can be classified into a certain category (point group).  I found this great idea about a scavenger hunt on an inorganic chemist educator's website.  Students have to go out and find objects that can be classified into certain point groups.  For those of you who are interested in point groups and symmetry, here's what they found:


Pictures are classified as: C1, C2h, C3v, Cinfinity, Cs, D2, D3d, D3h, Dinfinity, Ih, Oh, S2n, Td














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