A sophomore-level organic chemistry computational exercise centering upon the inter-related concepts of conjugation, aromaticity, and the acid/base chemistry associated with aromatics that can be incorporated into the laboratory setting or can be assigned as homework prior to the teaching of these concepts in lecture is described. An instructor-generated inductive approach is utilized to enable students to generate principles from data, to facilitate the student’s ability to tether together interpretations from multiple data sets, and to enable the visualization of the concepts derived. The computational exercise in final form suitable for distribution to students, a complete instructional guide to equip students with the detailed procedures for performing each computational step and an instructor’s guide with the complete answers for the entire exercise are included.
Bryant et al. (Fri,) studied this question.