The interest and focus of this project is in developing and teaching a 3-credit-hour, 1-semester, molecular modeling computational chemistry course for senior undergraduate chemistry majors. The new modeling course replaces an existing undergraduate course that emphasized chemical calculations using FORTRAN. The availability of excellent, inexpensive, and interactive computational and modeling software, along with the need to modernize the undergraduate course offerings, alleviates the need for this particular FORTRAN-based course. Now there is no outstanding reason to exclude undergraduates in the chemistry program from this type of pedagogy which emphasizes training in computational, electronic, and vibrational structure, calculations ranging from molecular mechanics to semi-empirical to ab-initio methods. Such a modeling course has never been taught.
