9451383 Bocarsly An undergraduate laboratory for computational chemistry is being established. This laboratory and the accompanying computational exercises are designed to interface with laboratory courses at each level of the undergraduate curriculum, including general, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry. Each of the computational exercises concerns aspects of compounds which are the subject of experimental studies in the course curricula. Thus, in each case, students are either synthesizing and/or performing physical studies on the same materials which are the subjects of their computations. The intention behind this approach is twofold. First, each exercise provides the student with a demonstration of the power of computational techniques in chemistry. In addition, the use of a combination of methods (experimental and computational) to study a given molecular system illustrates for students that science often progresses by focusing a broad variety of techniques on a single problem. The computer laboratory is structured as follows: two graphics workstations with large computational capacity are networked to ten Macintosh and ten personal computers. The small systems serve as terminals for the workstations. Students construct their molecular models at the small computer systems and submit their calculations to one of the workstations. This structure makes the software capacity and the computational power of the workstations available to all users. Both Macintosh and personal computers are available so that educational software written for either of these platforms can be incorporated.
