Providing students with adequate access to symbolic software often presents a barrier to using that software in teaching. This is especially true for smaller departments where computer resources in the student laboratories become inaccessible in evenings and on weekends. Several possibilities exist for greater accessibility.

One approach is to install the symbolic software on several computers in one of the general-purpose, late-closing campus computer laboratories. The number of copies of the software would be determined by the needs of the courses requiring its use. In this scenario students needing the software for homework or laboratory reports would have first priority for using these computers.

Another approach is to use an ACS student affiliates meeting/study room. Two or three computers with installed software would serve the needs of students for a variety of course-related activities. There is nothing more effective than group work and peer interaction for spurring progress in software skill development and concept mastery.

A third option is for the department to purchase sufficient copies of the software to lend to students. The software would be collected at the end of the course and be available to lend again the following year. This approach would permit approximately 3–4 years of software use if one were willing to use an older version in the later years. This is not a major issue because even the most advanced topics in undergraduate physical chemistry courses are handled adequately by software versions that are 2 or 3 generations old. Costs, when leveraged over several years, are manageable and fall in line with other disposable materials, such as chemicals and glassware, used by a chemistry department.

The last alternative is to ask students to purchase a copy of the latest version of the software or to try to purchase a used older version. For example, a used copy of Mathcad 6, 7, or 8 would be useful for drafting documents at home that can be later polished on campus with the version of Mathcad used for the course. This poses no problem for students because the style of entry of information is similar across the last few versions of Mathcad.

Student access to software is only valuable when paired with well-crafted documents that enhance learning. In this column we introduce several new Mathcad templates that meet the latter criterion.

Glenn Lo has developed exercises that enable students to understand the Bohr Correspondence Principle. Lo elegantly uses collapsed regions as an accessory to developing the topic. The first part of Lo's document can be used in the quantum chemistry curriculum just after completion of the particle in the box discussion. Other parts of the document focus on the harmonic oscillator and hydrogen atom. This makes the document useful as a review of concepts in a new context throughout the course. The documents come in both student and faculty versions.

Keith Dunn provides students with an understandable introduction to the variational method. Linear combinations of particle-in-a-box basis functions form approximate solutions to the Schrödinger equation for the harmonic oscillator. Students then explore the concepts of the variational method as preparation for understanding more complex molecular orbital calculations.

The last document, by James LoBue, provides a detailed introduction of the Hückel molecular orbital method. This document builds on the concepts learned in Dunn's Variational Mathcad document and introduces students to matrix methods for determining the energy levels and molecular orbitals for a conjugated molecule. This prepares students to learn the more advanced molecular orbital calculation methods found in many molecular modeling programs.

The documents presented here can be used with Mathcad 8, Mathcad 2001, or higher versions of Mathcad. All of the documents in this column would make very good accessory physical chemistry laboratory activities when coupled to an appropriate experiment such as the UV–vis studies of conjugated dyes.