Welcome to the Short Course in Computational Chemistry

Welcome to the "Short Course in Computational Chemistry", created and supported by the Department of Science Chemistry Department of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) in Durham, North Carolina.

As the name suggests, this course is designed to provide a resource for high school students and teachers, undergraduate students and faculty, and others interested in learning computational chemistry. The course is designed to be modular, so arranging the modules in a classroom or self-study environment that best suits the learning needs of the student(s) is possible.

Each module or session has roughly the same format:

Presentation materials: this includes a video podcast, usually around 20 minutes long, providing content background for the topic in that session. The PowerPoint slides are also provided, with the text of the podcast narration, for use as appropriate. Users may use these materials for proper educational uses but may not use them for any commercial purposes.
Lab materials: This includes a lab activity, a related worksheet, and typically one or more "log" files, which are the output of some calculations conducted by the course developers. These files are provided so students without access to computational chemistry software can study the output files and analyze the results.

The primary target audience for this course is AP Chemistry students and teachers in American high schools. Specifically, the scope and sequence of the course materials are designed for use as an enrichment activity for the three- to four-week period between the end of the AP Chemistry exams in early May and the end of the school year in early June. We hope that high school chemistry teachers can use some or all of these materials, either in a whole class environment or for individualized or small group study, during that period at the end of the school year.

These materials are based on materials developed over the past 15 years by educators at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. The school's support of the North Carolina High School Computational Chemistry Server (http://chemistry.ncssm.edu Links to an external site.) has made this course a reality. NCSSM also appreciates the support from the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program through the Department of Chemistry, North Carolina State University, under the direction of Dr. Elena Jakubikova, with funding from the National Science Foundation, NSF Award #1359377, ”REU Site: Research Experience for Undergraduates at the Interface of Computations and Experiments at the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina State University.”