This site provides an artistic rendition of periodic properties of elements along with detailed scientific explanations. This includes new and vibrant visual assessment to explore and reflect upon the diversity of elements that comprise matter in as unique and innovative manner as possible. It does so not only by rendering images of the respective elements but also by investigating the manner in which they affect our daily lives in largely unseen and often unexpected ways.
Type of Material:
The site consists of text and artistic presentations where such things as ionization potentials are converted into 3 dimensional landscape images as well as animations, graphs and textual information.
Recommended Uses:
This learning module may be assigned as ancillary material to be viewed as needed by individual students or in collaborative groups leading to discussion. Such discussion could increase the interest and abiltiy of a student to undertand the relationship between chemcial behavior, position in the periodic table and structure of the element
Technical Requirements:
Requires only standard computer platform with Adobe acrobat reader or Flash, and Quicktime for viewing movies.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
The purpose appears to be interfacing the numerical details of periodic elemental properties with artistic presentation to increase interest and spur the imagination of the reader. It is a very creative site, transforming abstract information into concrete images to help relate concepts to chemical behaviour.
Target Student Population:
General chemistry students, including high school students will benefit from this.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
Requires only introductory chemistry with basic knowledge of matter,
elements and compounds
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
The artistic and imaginative rendering of numerical information is fabulous as this site gives a very comprehensive, artisitic, graphic introduction to the Periodic Table of Elements. The graphics, and animations, etc are very effective in bringing the information to the user. Each group of elements has detailed information organized according to several categories as follows: general features, appearance, general reactrivity, occurrence, extraction, physical and chemical properties, oxidation states and industrial information
Concerns:
Students will appreciate the beautiful art work, but may have struggles relating
that back to how to use periodic properties to predict and understand chemical reactivity.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
This site can very effectively bring realistic artistic images of trends in properties and behavior of elements to students. This is an area where traditionally students have trouble understanding and visualizing. One area called "Periodic Landscapes" has several beautiful computer generated pictures based on trends and patterns within the Periodic Table: example, Ionization Energy plotted against atomic number as 3-D bar chart. The historical information about the discovery of each element,abundance in the Universe and on Earth, alchemist symbols for a lot of the elements, and use and applications are well described and artistically presented including an animation using audi and video to catch the imagination. It reinforces that Chemistry can indeed be a "beautiful" subject
Concerns:
It does not cause students to deal with numerical estimates, so the site will be of more interest and curiosity for those who are likely to remain outside of science for their careers. Although the information is very beautifully presented,
students would need guidance from instructors in how this extensive and artistically developed information may be used to help increase their understanding of elements and their properties
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
The site loads quickly and has a pleasing color balance. It is well designed that is robust and easy to use and navigate without trapping the user. It has links to several related modules that further explain elements, compounds and their properties.
Concerns:
The text information is on a scrollable single page. Generally, that drives users away from the information past the first page. The symbols are obscure. Nobody will be able to figure out what they mean say they will just randomly click. Icons are supposed to be a quick guide rather than a source of puzzlement. One reviewer found the wait time for launching several of the animations of elements to be a little long, although it is possible that this was due to high traffic volume for the site.
Other Issues and Comments:
This is a beautiful artistic collection that can serve as a useful resource to support the belief held by Chemists "There is an inherent beauty to the way nature is and works, we only need to find a good effective way to present that to students."
Creative Commons:
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