Maureen Scharberg, meeting chair, and Tom Wildeman, program committee chair, have put together a great program (page 276) for the spring ACS meeting. Highlights of the meeting that are related to the Journal are the Chemical Exposition (where we will have a booth and invite you to come see us), the High School Day (where both the editore and high school editore will be present and looking for input about how the Journal can serve high school teachers better), and a symposium in honor of retired Journal editore Joe Lagowski. Participate in these and other Div CHED activities in San Francisco! Don't miss visiting the Exploratorium, a unique hands-on science adventure.

A striking and beautiful demonstration of Le Chatelier's principle is described by Cortel (tested by McWherter and Gilbert). If a crystal of KI is placed on a Petri dish and a drop of Pb(NO₃)₂ solution is added, crystals of both PbI₂ and KPbI₃ can form, making a "fried egg" with yellow PbI₂ in the center and white KPbI₃ around the outside. The relative sizes of the "white" and "yolk" can be varied by using larger or smaller crystals of KI with the same volume of Pb(NO₃)₂ solution. As an exercise, you should predict whether the yolk or white gets bigger as the size of the KI crystal increases. (The answer is in the middle of the book--shown graphically in the photographs on page 297.)

Several papers this month describe interesting classroom and laboratory activities that involve electromagnetic radiation. Hughes and Holmes (page 298) describe use of a laser to show diffraction effects in a lecture setting. Heuer and Koubek (page 313) have developed a classroom/laboratory activity for general chemistry students that explores Hooke's law, infrared spectra of molecules, and the idea of resonant energy transfer from radiation to molecular vibrations.

Beginning on page 316, Meserole et al. report on an experiment designed to show the effectiveness of IR absorption by greenhouse gases, specifically CO2. For those teaching at the physical chemistry level, Grant and Hardwick have developed an experiment on stimulated Raman spectroscopy of small molecules (page 318), and for the organic laboratory an experiment involving acceleration of a Fries rearrangement by microwave radiation is described on page 324 by Trehan et al. Urriolabeitia (page 325) has developed an inorganic laboratory exercise in which students characterize by NMR spectrometry several Pd(II) complexes that they have synthesized previously.

It has been a decade since Bob Brasted passed away, but every two years we are reminded of his many contributions to DivCHED and chemical education in general by the presentation of the Brasted Lecture at the biennial conference on chemical education. This past summer the Brasted Lecturer was Alex Johnstone of Glasgow University. In his award address, which begins on page 262, he suggests that the pursuit of good teaching and of research should have similar structures. If chemical education is a discipline, it needs to emphasize reproducible, transferable outcomes that help all of us improve student learning. Johnstone has been one of the foremost practitioners of this point of view, and his address on the occasion of a well-deserved award is excellent reading.

Glenn Crosby thinks that scientists must play a role in the undergraduate education of those who will teach in elementary schools. In his commentary on page 271 he argues for including practicing scientists along with experts in curriculum design and teaching methods in the development of courses for preservice elementary teachers. As one who has developed and taught a course of the sort he recommends, he provides many interesting insights.

This issue is chock full of material for those who are interested and active in using technology to help their students learn. In her News from On-Line column in the Chemical Education Today section (page 260), Judd describes a variety of World Wide Web sites of interest to teachers at all levels. The ACS meeting program (page 276) also lists a symposium on using the WWW that runs four days. Sauder et al. describe successes and problems of a WWW-based intercollegiate physical chemistry learning community that connected four geographically separated campuses. Parrill and Gervay (page 329) have prepared stereochemistry tutorials and made them available on the WWW.

Russell et al. describe results of a major development effort that has created computer-based materials that present simultaneously macroscopic events, atomic-scale models of those same events, and symbolic representations (equations, formulas, etc.) of the same events. Evaluation by pretest and posttest indicates that these materials can reduce the incidence of misconceptions about equilibrium. Two other papers report the use of spreadsheets. Hansen, Kouri, and Hoffman describe a template for quantum mechanical wave packet propagation on page 335, and on page 328 Sundheim describes how to use a spreadsheet to examine propagation of errors. As usual, JCE: Software has an offering, this time three programs for DOS that are described on page 346.