More importantly, it is a real game, not some faux education chunky, clunky mess.Ī student goes 'behind the eyes' of the main character and investigates a world populated by larger than life molecules. Theatre productions can be storyboarded, individually-built rollercoasters ridden, recreations of Bin Laden's last stand, car races and endless physics including buoyancy, acceleration, pendulums and gravity.
Then I fire up the video game Garry's Mod. A circle? What about a kite? No, no and no.Įventually some bright spark realises that the only place for the fourth student is on the next floor up, making a tetrahedron. So what about four students? In a square maybe? No, this separates the student across the square further apart from the others. I always try to teach using riddles and paradoxes, so for this lesson pose the question: if a teacher wants to seat three chatty students equally apart from each other, what seating arrangement should he or she choose?Īn equilateral triangle, comes the answer. So it must be approached multiple times in multiple ways. There are many ways to teach this peculiar topic which only half of the students are able to grasp at first. Ammonia molecules, for example, are tiny squashed pyramids but there are myriad other shapes from seesaws to dog legs.Įngaging with them in 2D, or briefly in school with a never to be seen again plastic model can, understandably, be uninspiring. Molecular geometry is a thorny subject, requiring students to manipulate 3D objects in their heads and deliver the names and bond angles of the resulting shapes which govern many of their properties, such as boiling point and solubility. Essentially, I have devoted my academic life to the electron – a particle no one has ever seen and which noted physicist Richard Feynman postulated there was only one in the entire universe.
Chemistry is, I will admit, sometimes hard to love.
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