My experience in developing and teaching a physical chemistry course that uses Mathematica

CHED 477

Horia Metiu, metiu@chem.ucsb.edu, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9510
I would like to share my experience in developing a physical chemistry course for upper-division chemistry undergraduates that uses Mathematica for solving problems. Since we did not have enough computers for all the students, the course was structured so that it could also be taken by students who did not use a computer. To prepare those students who wanted to learn Mathematica, we introduced a "laboratory" course where we taught Mathematica programming. A tutorial containing these lectures was also developed and made available on the web. This material formed the nucleus for a Physical Chemistry textbook that was published this year. I would like to present the advantages offered by using the computer for performing calculations on realistic examples and also to discuss possible pitfalls and difficulties.