Hi, this is Tom Loschiavo, Chemistry Education Manager at PASCO scientific.
I'm here today to talk about Odyssey software.
Odyssey software represents a great complement to PASCO's Chemistry offering.
With PASCO Chemistry, you have sensors and probeware to collect and analyze data
and understand chemistry from a macroscopic perspective.
Odyssey gives you a molecular perspective of those same chemistry concepts,
to truly understand why things happen.
The Odyssey software is broken out into a couple of sections:
Molecular Labs, Tutorials, Applied Chemistry, a Stockroom, and an Electronic Model Kit.
We're going to look at the Labs first.
The labs are broken out into different categories relevant to chemistry:
matter, thermochemistry, atoms and periodicity, kinetics, equilibrium,
all the way down to organic chemistry and biochemistry.
Looking at gases, one thing we can do is look at the distribution of kinetic energies.
The labs are essentially a tutorial with questions.
They tell you how to do the experiment, and then the questions guide the analysis for the students.
So it's almost a guided inquiry approach.
The teacher's guide will have an answer key, a place for comments,
and you can print these labs or have them used as a PDF.
Let's see how this works.
This is a sample of xenon gas. We can watch those gas molecules move around, creating pressure.
If we want to understand the kinetic energy of those particles, we can look at that in a couple of different ways.
From the View tab, we can select Plots; and in Plots, we can look the Kinetic Energy.
We can also look at the molecules themselves.
From the Model tab, we can go to Color by Property and look at Translational Kinetic Energy.
Now we see the different molecules that are moving at different speeds.
The nice thing about Odyssey software is it's not just an animation, it is a simulation.
So, the properties are changeable.
For example, if I want to change the temperature and see how this distribution is affected,
I can go to View > Properties, come down here and hit Temperature, and now I can change the temperature
and see how the distribution changes and see the molecules speed up or slow down.
Let's make this really cold. Now we can definitely see the change in the kinetic energy distribution.
Going back to Labs, another interesting lab is looking at a reaction mechanism.
So we see reactants and products. And we can see those reactants turn into products
and the mechanism that it undergoes for that to happen.
We can look at the electron density of those things as they change from reactants to products.
And we can look at a plot of the reaction coordinates.
Again, the directions are here, the analysis questions are here.
I'll go up to View, and select Plots. I'll select an XY plot,
and I want to look at the Reaction Coordinate versus the Relative Energy.
Now if I hit Play, I can see the molecules progressing, and I can see the relative energy of the molecules
as they go from the reactacts to the products through their mechanistic steps and transition states.
So those are the Labs.
Odyssey also has Tutorials, which are similar to the labs, but there aren't questions.
This is a nice way to get students or yourself using the software to really figure out
what it means and how to use it, like the types of things that you can do.
If we look at Equilibria, again, with these things, the instructions are right along the side
so you can understand how to do things as you learn about the software.
Here we see the trans-isomer progressing to a cis-isomer and we can put that into a system.
Now, we can start the simulation, and we can see those molecules changing from cis- to trans-.
In this case, it's a little hard to see which one is doing what, so we can group them by their property.
If we color these molecules by their dipole moment,
we can see that some of them have a dipole moment and some of them do not.
We can also see that some of them are in this white or gray area, and they look like
they are right in the middle of transitioning from the cis- to the trans- molecule.
Also in Odyssey, there's an Applied Chemistry section, which is selected topics
from the world of chemistry--interesting molecules there.
And an even bigger group of collections of molecules, which is the Molecular Stock Room.
The molecules here are grouped by inorganic, organic mixtures, or elements.
You can look at them as individual compounds or in categories. I find categories a little easier to see.
But if we look at the Carbon Group, for example, then we see graphite, diamond, fullerene.
But these aren't just pictures of the molecules. These are actual simulations of the molecules.
So we get an idea of how those molecules move, based on their structure.
Diamond, fullerene, and in some cases, we get an example of how the molecule exists.
In this case, here's fullerene as a solid, and how that moves as a solid--
the bending, stretching, vibrating of the bonds in the molecule.
Another subset of this is Organic. This is a great way to teach organic chemistry
to really get a student's perspective on visualizing the molecules themselves.
This is a collection of alcohols. Again, not only does it give the molecule,
it gives the state of matter that the molecule is typically in.
These aren't just pictures. These are simulations of how that molecule behaves.
The other nice thing is we get an interaction map, showing electropositive and electronegative regions
based on the atoms that are in the molecule.
Instead of looking at some prebuilt molecules, advanced users might want to build their own molecules.
So you can go to the Modeling Kit for that. Again, there are examples, or tutorials of how to do that.
You not only can build molecules, you can build samples in situations--
so gases, or mixtures, or liquids.
We'll look at a simple example, and then a more complicated example.
We're just going to build a simple organic compound.
Again, not just a static picture, but actually showing movement of the molecule.
For a more complicated example, we can build a peptide.
We'll build an alpha helix and we'll string a couple of these together.
Now, if we want to see the alpha helix structure of this, we can go to Ribbons, and there we go.
We can also see the hydrogen bonds that are holding this together.
The Odyssey software is a great complement to PASCO Chemistry.
It's not just animations, it's simulations. It's not just building,
it's building and putting into perspective, putting into a real chemistry context.
Thank you very much. This is Tom Loschiavo, from PASCO scientific.
Feel free to reach me at chemistry@pasco.com if you have any questions.