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Excel spreadsheets are an important tool for producing interactive material for chemistry instruction. Since these spreadsheets can be viewed or downloaded with modern Web browsers, materials in this format make great WebWare for the classroom, laboratory, dormitory, or home! Spreadsheets can quickly perform mathematical calculations and display the results in a graphical form that gives students a visual representation of what the results mean. Simple input fields can allow instructors and students to modify parameters and immediately see the implications of these changes graphically. Using spreadsheets, instructors can spend more of their time showing, and less time describing the topic at hand. This is similar to the power of a chemical demonstration to visually reinforce written chemical equations and explanations. With a spreadsheet “demonstration”, students can be invited to join in and add their own input. Students get a chance to try out their own ideas and immediately see the results; they can spend their time experimenting, observing, and thinking rather than calculating: this is excellent pedagogy! This month we add The Effect of Anharmonicity on Diatomic Vibration: A Spreadsheet Simulation to our peer-reviewed collection. Instructors and students can use this spreadsheet to quickly and easily observe how the shape of a one-dimensional vibrational potential energy curve and its associated vibrational quantum energy levels depend on the anharmonicity. This illustrates the connection between the harmonic (approximation) and anharmonic descriptions of molecular vibrations.
You can find The Effect of Anharmonicity on Diatomic Vibration: A Spreadsheet Simulation and other interactive spreadsheets in the peer-reviewed and open-review collections of JCE WebWare. The Effect of Anharmonicity on Diatomic Vibration: A Spreadsheet Simulation is an expansion of one of the interactive spreadsheets in our open-review collection contributed by the co-author, William F. Coleman. JCE WebWare has published several other spreadsheets in both our peer-reviewed and open-review collections, and has several more in preparation. If you have an interactive spreadsheet that you have developed for your classroom and students, consider submitting it to one of the JCE WebWare collections. Let us help you share your work with the rest of the JCE community! Read the submission information and guidelines, or contact the WebWare editors.
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