September 8, 2003, New York, NY, USA, ACD/Labs ACS Fall Academic Workshop

Teaching nomenclature through a software experience

Robin Martin, Antony Williams, Bert Ramsay, and Scott Macdonald

Abstract

A knowledge of systematic nomenclature is a necessary part of a chemistry schooling experience. However with two primary nomenclature systems accepted worldwide, those of IUPAC and CAS, naming compounds is not a natural activity even for the most skilled scientist. How much of a task is it for a student to understand that methylethyl ketone and 2-butanone represent the same structure? Can they take the structure of limonene and produce the correct IUPAC name of 1-Methyl-4-(1-methylethenyl)cyclohexene? With the challenges of stereo centers the level of confusion for generating systematic names will rise dramatically. Much of this confusion can be avoided if the students could use structure-nomenclature software packages to compare the chemical structures directly with their names. The intention is to both teach the approach of systematic nomenclature as well as aid in the process. This talk will focus on one systematic naming program presently available and discuss how pedagogical functionality has been included to aid the teaching process. A Student's guide has recently been developed to support a freely available IUPAC naming tool that is available for download. The guide has been built to help students recognize the naming of functional groups and to distinguish between ambiguous chemical names.

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