The structure of molecules is extremely important in chemistry teaching. The students and the teachers can find a lot of sites and molecular galleries on World Wide Web dedicated to VRML modelling. Most of them are, however, not on the secondary school level, without any explanations. Therefore as an example of the use of the VRML molecules we have developed the "Molecular Geometry". This freeware material is a hypertext course for undergraduate students and it was tested in several Hungarian secondary schools and in teacher retraining courses.

The molecules we have developed are space-filling models. We plan to create other models (eg. ball and stick etc.) and also animamations. Our molecules are VRML files which are interactive 3D models.

The colours we used for hypotethic molecules:

central atom
 
ligand #1
 
ligand #2
 
lone pair
 
The colours we used for examples:
oxygen (O)
 
hydrogen (H)
 
carbon (C)
 
beryllium (Be)
 
boron (B)
 
fluorine (F)
 
chlorine (Cl)
 
nitrogen (N)
 
 

To view the VRML models you need a VRML-viewer like Cosmo Player 2.0.
If you have any questions you can contact the authors.

Good luck!