Graphical Method to Characterize the Bonding Patterns of Elements

Abstract

In chemistry teaching, chemical bonding between two elements is important and fundamental content. In order to stimulate students’ interest in learning and enhance their understanding and cognition of bonding, we created the Bonding Pattern Activity in the teaching of “General Chemistry”, a new first-year undergraduate activity where students use a web browser to query compounds from a free chemical database owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry and plot the distribution map of bonding elements in the periodic table for each element. Through this activity students can vividly understand how bonding elements are distributed in the periodic table from a systematic perspective and can have a better understanding of element similarity and periodic properties. To make this activity possible, we developed an operation manual to extract data from the Internet and an open-source python program to draw the distribution map. Students were excited by the analysis of the large data set from the Internet in comparison to traditional limited data in textbooks and appreciated their acquired knowledge about bonding patterns. Furthermore, the process by which students find missing data in the database could be used to engage them with the chemical literature. The Bonding Pattern Activity is entirely open-source and readily deployable at any university wishing to teach “General Chemistry” or “Inorganic Chemistry”.