Pre-pharmacy, pre-medicine, entry-level pharmacy students, as well as students in other health professions, would benefit from the “Acid–Base Properties of Drugs” online module by allowing them to explore, on their own time, how the concepts they have learned in general and organic chemistry relate to the actions and reactions of drugs in the body.

Signal-to-noise enhancement is an important topic to cover in any undergraduate instrumental analysis course. With the ubiquity of electronic chemical instrumentation, students who want to understand the construction of instruments must understand the nature of an electronic signal and how it is transduced into a form that is understood by a human operator. An important and relevant component of signal-to-noise enhancement is digital filtering. While digital filters are discussed in most instrumental analysis textbooks, their numerically intensive nature makes them difficult to include in a student exercise in any way except pictorially. FT Digital Filtering allows the user to change the parameters of a simulated digital filter and see the effect the filtering has on a noisy signal.

Achieving understanding of complicated molecular phenomena from two-dimensional drawings can be a challenge. Three examples are the C₂ and C₃ symmetry operations in chiral tris chelates, the assignment of absolute configurations in these molecules, and the non-dissociative mechanisms (Bailar Twist and Rây-Dutt) that interchange Λ and Δ enantiomers. Combining three-dimensional representations of the molecules from the Cambridge Structural Data Base, computational output examining the imaginary frequencies of transition states, and the powerful molecular visualization program Jmol, we present here a Web site to aid in teaching these concepts.

Population versus Sampling Statistics

When scientists draw random samples to be measured they expect their results will be accurate, assuming all systematic errors have been removed from the experiment. Unlike systematic errors, random errors cannot be removed from the experiment—only reduced. If several replicates are measured for each sample, random errors are mathematically minimized and are relegated to affecting precision, not accuracy. For some students, the difference between accuracy and precision is not clear enough for this to make sense. The solution is for students to interact with the statistics, which requires the laborious generation of multiple sets of random numbers, numerical comparisons, and graphical presentations of the data. The purpose of the spreadsheet exercise presented here is to remove the hurdle of constructing and generating such an interaction. The spreadsheet provides students with a self-led exercise that reinforces the statistics of sample and population distributions.