Abstract:

After teaching Quantum Chemistry during several courses, we know that the learning of Quantum Chemistry is difficult for a high percentage of students, due to the abstraction involved. Even some students who pass the course do not acquire in-deep knowledge. In addition to this, in times of pandemic, we find ourselves with a new obstacle: the lack of students in the classroom.

Last year, on March 13th, the pandemic brought our lives to a halt. From one day to the next, we had to change our teaching method. In our case, we were teaching a Quantum Chemistry course in the second year of the Degree in Chemistry and we had an added handicap: it was the last course to teach this subject since it belongs to a study plan in extinction.

The objectives of this project were mainly two:
- To keep our students motivated despite been at home.
- To help students to understand a part of the subject that is especially difficult for them.

In order to achieve these objectives, we decided to employ the Think, Talk, and Write (TTW) model. This model tries to build knowledge through thinking, speaking, and writing and was introduced by Huinker and Laughlin. It is a suitable model for working in small groups. We found that it would be interesting for the students to meet virtually and not lose contact with each other.

Our role as teachers was to select an appropriate task to be solved by the students. As a result, we proposed the application of the TTW model to the resolution of a complete exercise: students have to indicate if the system H43+ is stable in a square planar geometry. To solve this problem, different concepts of Quantum Chemistry must be used.

In order to test the benefits obtained from applying the model, two different procedures were employed: a survey was used to find out about the opinion of the students and in the final exam several questions were related to the exercise.
The main conclusion of this project was that the application of this methodology was beneficial for the students both on a formative and personal level.

Keywords:

TTW model, group theory, Quantum chemistry.