Chemistry animation

I animated intermolecular and intramolecular bonds using blender for an AP Chemistry presentation. Here is the Linky.
And here is a picture http://nickclaw.googlepages.com/screeny.png

Although it is a nice animation, there are so many incorrect facts about chemical bonding that is far from educational. For instance NaF is an ionic material, its bonding is due to electrostatic interactions not dipole-dipole bonding. The best known example of dipole-dipole bonding would be water, which because of the very strong nature of the bonding is also sub-classified as hydrogen bonding.

The animation is nice, but I agree with sornen about the Sodium Fluoride salt. The structure of salts are arranged in such a way that the cations have a face-centred cubic arrangement and the anions occupy the octahedral ‘holes’. Also your statement about Hydrogen Bonding being the strongest type seems a little iffy… in water those bonds are easily broken… otherwise we wouldn’t be able to swim. They’re also broken easily in the process of PCR (Polymerised Chain Reaction); a process which ‘splits’ the double helix in DNA by breaking the Hydrogen bonds that hold the structure together.

Since this is an ART forum, there’s no point really going into the chemistry, so I’ll give you some art comments. The animation is great, I really like it, the only comment I’d have to make is the way the water molecules on the Hydrogen Bonding page overlay the text. Other than that I think it’s great, very clean looking and much nicer than the awful videos we used to be shown in school :slight_smile:

Keep it up

My teacher said all the facts were right. But maybe she wasn’t paying attention to the animations themselves. But i know that hydrogen bonds are definitely the strongest INTERmolecular force compared to dipole-dipole bonds and london dispersion forces. Thanks a lot for your comments.

I think for school purposes it is a great educational video.
Of course there are some mistakes, but usually you don’t learn much about closest packing and crystal structures in school.

Sometimes it is even better to not tell the complete story in school.
I study chemistry at university and one day my little sister came to me because she had to do some chemistry homework. I used all the books and scripts I had at home, so I’m quite sure that everything was correct. But in the end she only got a C (or 3 here in Germany) because the teacher didn’t know the reactions she had written down in her homework. :eek:

But if you are interested in the topic then maybe take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_structure#Close-packing