Feedback - January 2014

By 2014-01-07T00:00:00

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Discussions from the magazine, website and social media

We launched our brand new website in November and we’ve been delighted with the feedback received so far. Please do get in touch to let us know what you think as this will help us with future developments.

Our new site lets you comment directly on articles. Comments were kicked off on The trouble with the Aufbau principle, Eric Scerri’s feature on how generations of teachers are misleading their students by incorrectly teaching the electronic configurations of atoms and ions. Chas McCaw from Winchester College, UK, had this to say:

Thanks for such an interesting article, Eric. It has generated a lot of discussion at Winchester and with colleagues from other schools. 

One point raised was about unipositive ions in the first row d block. There is no clear rule about the unipositive ions: indeed half are s1 and half are s0. What makes generalisation difficult is that the 4s and 3d energy levels are very similar. 4s is lower in energy for K and Ca, but since 4s offers little shielding to the 3d orbitals, the filling of the 4s orbital for K and Ca is accompanied by a large drop in energy of the 3d orbitals, so that 3d is lower in energy than 4s when you get to Sc, but only just. 4s and 3d remain very close in energy, with 3d slightly lower than 4s, right across the first row of the d block.

Eric was quick to respond with some useful guidelines for teachers to convey to students. Take a look at his advice.

For more feedback from our readers this month, see the full article

Thanks for using Education in Chemistry. You can view one Education in Chemistry article per month as a visitor. 

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