Fully Exploiting the Potential of the Periodic Table through Pattern Recognition

摘要

As someone who teaches general chemistry,I continue to be frustrated by how students attempt to assimilate chemical information.Despite our efforts to paint the big picture,students frequently view each chemical "byte",whether formula,structure,or reaction,as something to be learned without regard to what should (we hope) already be in place.Additionally,students frequently complain about all the "exceptions" to the rules.In my opinion,much of this stems from the fact that we have not been particularly clever in how we extract,in an ordered and rational manner,the wealth of information embedded in the periodic table.