Periodic Table Live! Excites Students

Periodic Table Live! (PTL!) offers several interactive features that set it apart from most of the periodic tables on the Web. PTL! has videos showing the reactions of many elements with air, water, acids, and base: if students want to see something blow up, they can go to PTL! and watch sodium react with concentrated acids; then they can look for videos of other reactive elements and perhaps pick up on patterns of reactivity. Students can manipulate an interactive, solid-state structure for each element to see it from all angles. Data obtained from trusted sources include a large collection of physical and atomic-scale properties; definitions of each property (such as ionization energy or ionic radius); and citations to data sources. The Chart/Sort module is especially valuable for classroom presentation and student exploration. It allows any numeric property to be graphed against any other numeric property for all of the elements or for a single group or a single period. The data are tabulated and can be sorted also. Most important of all is the fact that students can contribute to PTL! The descriptions of the elements and the historical vignettes about scientists who discovered elements are in a wiki. Thus, anyone—including students—can contribute to PTL!’s repository of information. One instructor at the high school level who asked her students to use Periodic Table Live! to investigate various elements found that although these students had used several other online periodic tables prior to the assignment, more than 85% of them ranked PTL! the “best Web site out there” because “You can send them information not on their site and if they post it for that element, they will give you credit for submitting it to them.” Students really liked the idea that they might be able to investigate something and contribute to a larger, apparently adult, enterprise. Another student said, “You mean I could know something they do not know, really? I am looking for something and sending it to them.” In college-level chemistry courses, students have responded with similar enthusiasm to researching and contributing element information. Not just an online periodic table, PTL! is a new approach to enabling students to learn.