CHEM T.V. - A Students View Incredible, its a Friday night and 1 week from now I will be on the other side of the world starting a 5 month business trip in Japan and I find myself writing an evaluation of the afore mentioned software. As a part time student I am always looking for something which will assist with studies. Mainly from a time saving point of view. Will Chem TV be the answer to my needs. Well, the cover looks very good. It contains tutorials covering a total of 24 different topics within scope of a typical organic chemistry degree syllabus. But, will it be any good itself. Installation is straightforward, from the file, run menu select install in either windows 3.1x or, as in my case, windows 95 and away you go. Installation presents you with seven different groups : Chem TV button basics - a brief guide on how to follow the tutorials through with respect to what buttons to press. Chem TV Instructional Uses - instructional suggestions for use either singularly or in a group both in and out of lecture situations. Chem TV Master Doc. - Best described as a help screen but more along the lines of on line instructions and summaries rather than troubleshooting information. Then the real meat. The actual tutorial sessions are split into four groups : Reactions Self tests Special Topics Structure The Tutorials These consist of animated screen shows with a commentary. Often they are brief and act as a good summary on a subject. Generally they are not detailed enough to be used as a stand alone teaching medium, but would be good as either a substitute to lecture notes or alternately as a revision aid. An especially useful use could also be to reinforce the ideas given in a lecture in the context of visualization. The user interface is good and they are easy to follow. An added feature is that each stage can be repeated as many times as necessary without repeating the whole lesson over and over again. Also the movements between each stage can, in some cases followed through frame be frame. This is especially useful for visualization of difficult concepts. It could also be useful in a lecture situation to pause at each stage whilst the lecturer explains in detail. Although there is no pre-set order for the tutorials, the respective files are numbered and following these numbers provides some sort of logical order. If this is done then the first area reviewed will be structure. This section contains eleven different tutorials on the following topics : Atomic orbitals Bonding in organic compounds Models for visualization Functional groups Small alkyl groups Ethane conformations Butane conformations Introduction to stereochemistry Diastereoisomers Cycloalkanes Cyclohexane The next section is on reactions : The SN2 reaction The SN1 reaction Steric factors in SN reactions The E2 reaction The E1 reaction Chlorination of methane Catalytic hydrogenation of alkene Bromination of alkene Alkenes to glycol’s Reactions of organometallic reagents The final section, called special topics covers : Crown ethers Biochemical roles of enantiomers Peanut butter The length of these tutorials range from about 2.5 minutes to 10 minutes. Conclusion The first time I tried this program was on a 486 DX 40 with 8MB of RAM, a VGA screen and no sound card. This is only just above the minimum specification required. Whilst the program ran at a rate which would probably be acceptable, the lack of sound made it tedious and some of the screen shows were hard to follow without any verbal explanation. They could however be used as a good screen shows in lectures. Subsequently I ran them on a Pentium 120, 16MB RAM, SVGA screen with a sound card. The graphics interface remained good, but the addition of the commentary made the use of the package so much more productive. I would therefore recommend that if this package is to be used as a stand alone package rather than a screen show in a lecture, then a good sound card is a must, even on a lesser spec. PC. Mark Ebrey (Part-time B.Sc. Chemistry) February 1997

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