ACD/ChemSketch and ACD/ChemFolder

An excellent laboratory resource for the educator who wishes to enrich their Chemistry teaching

Keith Wilkinson,
Chemistry Department,
International School of Lusaka, Zambia

I am sure that all teachers of chemistry reading this will be familiar with the idea of the chemical structure drawing package, either as a current user, or from having used one in the past or from having seen one demonstrated. However, I'm writing this review particularly with those chemistry teachers in mind who have not yet felt the software available to be intuitive enough to put before their students. The good news is that ACD/ChemSketch is not only a simple package to learn and well within the grasp of 17 year old chemistry students, but also that the chemical drawing software is freeware. It was this that struck me most on first encountering the software in 1999. However, unlike other software offered freely for a period during either beta testing or a company's tactical building up of a customer base, ChemSketch remains free for educational use. This means that a class of students can work on a molecular project on a suite of computers with the software legally installed on each - this is indeed a feat when so much software is prohibitively expensive, and if in education you purchased it at all, then you'd consider yourself lucky to have one working legal copy.

It should be explained at this point how a product of high commercial quality and high academic standing should be in the freeware category. ACD/Labs' particular strength and origin as a company arises from their expertise in NMR and physicochemical property prediction, analytical data processing and management, and systematic nomenclature generation. The ChemSketch structure drawing package was developed as a platform from which the spectroscopy software and the property prediction software could be launched. The quality of the ACD/ChemSketch package is a foretaste of the various add-ons available, although the add-ons are proprietary software. For the teacher and their students, the freeware ChemSketch is the primary focus of this review, together with ACD/Dictionary which is available on licensing ChemSketch at $99. For those who find ChemSketch exciting, then there are educational pricing arrangements for ACD/ChemFolder, which allows users to build databases of structures and includes chemical structure and calculation software for PDA's.

As a chemical drawing package, ChemSketch allows molecules of any complexity including protein structures, nucleotides and base pairs to be assembled. I've put together by way of an example, a plan for a number of short sessions that would introduce students to using ChemSketch. Following these sessions, students would be expected to use ChemSketch for the presentation of organic structures, reaction schemes and mechanisms in their work.

Following an introductory session on skeletal formulae, a class activity might consist of a set of tasks of increasing complexity with the following learning objectives:

By the end of the first introductory session the student is:

• Able to draw hydrocarbon chains
• Able to substitute atoms e.g., OH for H, converting an alkane to an alcohol
• Able to change the bond types to give multiple bonds

(There are numerous helpful documents that can be downloaded from ACD/Labs' website, though I am not sure that there is yet such a tutorial. Searching the web has yielded some suitable documents in MS Word format that a teacher could tailor and adapt for their class.)

The second session could explore ChemSketch's features for:

• Cleaning up structures to make them more presentable
• Aligning structures horizontally or vertically (or rotating them to suit)
• Selecting structures, and cut and paste operations from ChemSketch to Word and Excel documents
• Performing simple property calculations (e.g., molecular/molar mass)
• Using templates of common structures and amino acids to build up a more complex polypeptide.

For students, word processing of assignments is widely expected, and so for organic chemistry the suitable processing of organic structures with a package such as this one should also be a norm. To facilitate this in our school department I have circulated such tools as these to students on CD, enabling them to set up ChemSketch on their home computers and on any computers where they may find themselves working.

Students and teachers in Europe will be both happy and disappointed at the ACD/Name freeware included with the software. On the plus side is its inclusion, although it is a limited version of the full package with a maximum of 50 atoms. On the negative side, the conventions are monocultural rather than international with the use of 'acetic' instead of 'ethanoic'. I am informed that in the full version the settings can be changed, allowing the user to determine which naming conventions to use, and it is not limited to 50 atoms. However, this is more a problem with the transatlantic nomenclature variations than a problem with ACD/Labs' software. I can only say that from my own vantage point as an international teacher teaching an International Baccalaureate that expects students to be fluent with IUPAC conventions, the use of 'ethanoic' rather than 'acetic' (and similar groans) would be more helpful.

In the final introductory session I introduce ChemSketch's more advanced functions which students find particularly engaging.

• Creating and optimizing 3D structures in the 3D Viewer
• Performing property calculations on a structure drawn in ChemSketch
• ACD/Dictionary*
• Simple structure searching in ACD/Dictionary*
• Searching for medicinal compounds using ACD/Dictionary* and optimising them in 3D

* ACD/Dictionary is available on purchase of the ChemSketch license at $99