Chemistry, Computing, and Whatever

Chem 111 for February 5-6

Since today was a review session and tomorrow is the first test, I'm taking a little hiatus from updating this class in the blog. At least the students get to look at lots of colorful reactions in the copper lab after the test. Back next week with the last bit of stoichiometry--the definition of molarity and calculations that involve it--and the first bit of developing our model for atomic structure.

Here's my favorite thing I said today: "Let's consider what happens every time we convert two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule into a water molecule and an angel earns its wings."

CMIT 140 for February 4-5

Time to do some catching up here and elsewhere. I noted last time how much I liked the foreach construct, so Chris has to go and point out how it's only useful if you have a collection (and really only if you want to iterate over every element of the collection). While that applies to how we've manipulated images so far, we'll need broader looping abilities, so it's time to look into the while loop.

Chem 111 for February 3

I don't like empirical formulas. I know they're important and real chemists actually use them, but much like enthalpy of formation, I don't know why they're inflicted on general chemistry students. We don't ever use them in the rest of the course unlike all the stoichiometry and molarity that surround them in the textbooks. But my colleagues disagree with me, so it's time to deal with them.

CMIT 140 for February 2

Running a little behind in the summaries, but here we go. Chris had control of the class today as we reviewed the motivation for having loops. As one of our students said, "To avoid tedium." Although I'd rephrase that as "To lessen tedium."

CMIT 401 for February 2

Now I'm really catching up. Maybe I'll try backdating it to make it look like I'm keeping up (it's actually Thursday afternoon, but we'll see if it looks like I posted this on Tuesday afternoon). And I suppose I should be putting IDS 419 in the title since most of the students are using the course to fill that requirement. But on to actual content. We start by looking at some examples from my favorite post of recent weeks, one that reviews the best robots of 2008.

Chem 111 for Jan 30

In class today, we mostly did review in preparation for the quiz and to help with the homework assignment. I won't go back into limiting reactants again, but I will say a little about balancing chemical equations.