Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., Donates
District-Wide License of ACD/ChemSketch to the Toronto District School Board

Toronto, ON, Canada, June 2004 -

Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) has provided a district-wide installation of the commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch v5.0 to the Toronto District School Board (http://www.tdsb.on.ca/).

Dr. Doug Hayhoe, an Instructional Leader in Science & Technology with the Toronto District School board, originally contacted ACD/Labs after reading about how our ACD/ChemSketch software is being used in schools throughout the United Kingdom and England. Doug was astounded to find out that ACD/Labs was headquartered just a stone's throw away from him. He envisioned the software being used to increase student learning by working with the simplest molecules through to the more complex.

Doug finds support for the idea of introducing chemistry software into the classroom in a couple of reports on research done in Israel.. There, students who used molecular modeling software to build simple molecules (i.e., NH3), measure bond angles and lengths, sketch structures, etc., showed gains in comprehension over traditional learning models. The Israeli articles are:

Nitza Barnea and Yehudit Dori, Computerized Molecular Modeling, Chemistry Education, 2000, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 109-120 http://www.uoi.gr/cerp/2000_January/16barneaf.html

Nitza Barnea and Yehudit Dori, High-School Chemistry Students' Performance ..., Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 8 NO. 4, 1999

ChemSketch is ACD/Labs' chemical structure drawing and visualization application for the Microsoft Windows (98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP) operating system. ChemSketch enables the user to draw virtually any chemical structure within the scope of their imagination, and provides the ability to add chemical structures and drawn images, such as lab equipment, Lewis structures, bond orbitals, and graphs, to reports and presentations. Other ChemSketch features include 2D and 3D optimization, importing various structure formats, and OLE linking to enable copying and pasting of chemical structures into other Microsoft applications.

For more information about ACD/ChemSketch, please visit our web site at: http://www.acdlabs.com/chemsketch/

About Advanced Chemistry Development

Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) is a chemistry software company offering solutions that truly integrate chemical structures with analytical chemistry information to produce ChemAnalytics™. ACD/Labs creates innovative software packages that aid chemical research scientists worldwide with spectroscopic validation of structures, elucidation of unknown substances, chromatographic separation, medicinal chemistry, preformulation of novel drug agents, systematic nomenclature generation, and chemical patenting and publication. Combined, ACD/Labs' solutions create an analytical informatics system that provides dramatic feed-forward effects on the chemical and pharmaceutical research process. Founded in 1993, and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, ACD/Labs employs a team of over 100 dedicated individuals whose continual efforts carry ACD/Labs' innovative technologies into pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical, and materials companies throughout the world. Information about Advanced Chemistry Development and its products can be found at www.acdlabs.com.

About the Toronto District School Board

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) was created on January 1, 1998 following the amalgamation of seven individual Boards of Education. It is the largest school board in Canada and the 4th largest school board in North America. The TDSB serves over 300,000 students every day and has 30,000 employees. The TDSB consists of 558 schools - 451 elementary and middle schools and 102 secondary schools. They are located in the heart of every community within the City of Toronto. The TDSB is committed to providing a positive and safe learning environment and the finest educational programs and services to ensure student success. For more information about the Toronto District School Board, please visit our web site at: www.tdsb.on.ca.