A Computational-Modeling Course for Undergraduate Students in Chemical Technology.

To introduce computational chemistry into our five-year chemical technology curriculum, an elective course was designed and offered to students who had completed a full year of organic chemistry but who did not have extensive mathematical or physical chemistry background. The course used PC-based software in a classroom setting. It was hands-on and interactive. To give students an appreciation for the wide range of applications computational methods have, current news items on computational topics were included, and a variety of exercises reflecting inorganic, organic, biochemistry, and vibrational spectroscopy were carried out in in-class working sessions and out-of-class assignments. The course culminated with the submission of student portfolios. A set of problems reflecting a range of difficulty was provided. Within guidelines, students selected from the set and carried out the computations required to answer the questions associated with each problem using their analysis of the computed data. This ar...