Ake Johansson

Teacher’s guide to using SAMSON as a learning tool in high school

SAMSON is a desktop application for molecular modeling that is available for Windows, Linux and Mac at SAMSON Connect. In this guide, you will find activities that can be performed with high school students in physics, chemistry and biology classes using SAMSON. This guide starts with a couple of tutorials about SAMSON to feel at ease with the software, followed by two tutorials on elementary chemistry. After becoming sufficiently autonomous in SAMSON, there are two possible paths to choose from.…

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Chair, Boat and Twist-Boat Conformation of Cyclohexanes and Glucose

This tutorial is going to teach you about the different conformations (shapes) of the cyclohexane (C6H12) and the glucose (C6H12O6). Cyclohexane: So, a cyclohexane is usually represented like this: Its bond angles between the carbon atoms measure 120°, but is this really accurate? And is there more than one way to represent these tricky molecules? To start of, what is a cyclohexane? Well, it is a cyclic hydrocarbon, formed by 6 carbon atoms in a hexagon, with each one…

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Simulation of stocking different molecules in a nanotube

The carbon nanotube (CNT) has many applications, and we are going to demonstrate some of them in this tutorial. A CNT is a stable structure, consisting of carbon atoms only, that are twisted into a cylinder and held together by convalent bonds. It has some interesting properties, such as electrical conduction and hydrophobic walls which we are going to discover together in this tutorial. Creating a nanotube: First of all, we create a dihydrogen (H₂) by combining two hydrogen atoms. Be careful not…

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