Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Chemistry SkillBuilder CD-ROM Steven D. Gammon and Sharon Hutchison. Prentice-Hall: New York, 1997. ISBN 0-13- 660143-X.
Chemistry SkillBuilder, an interactive CD-ROM for beginning chemistry students, is designed to accompany the introductory chemistry texts published by Prentice-Hall and is packaged for free when purchasing the Corwin text. The purpose of the CD is to enhance the student’s understanding of introductory chemistry concepts in conjunction with his or her textbook, not necessarily with the Corwin text. One of us (DH) ran the CD-ROM on a 66 MHz 486DX computer with 16 MB RAM in a Windows 3.1 environment, the minimum recommended standard. Unfortunately, this CD was not impressive. The loading time was extremely slow. When wanting to see another aspect of the CD-ROM, the transition was agonizing. There are three sections of the disk—stoichiometry, nomenclature, and balancing equations—and an accessories section that includes a periodic table and a simple calculator. In the nomenclature section, the terms weren’t as fully defined as necessary. The balancing equations section does explain how the equations were balanced. In the sample problems in the stoichiometry and nomenclature sections, the final answer is given without allowing the student to make mistakes through the process of trial and error. We fear that a beginning student might find that this CD-ROM is of little help. Disks such as Atkins and Jones’s Chemistry: Molecules, Matter, and Change, designed for chemistry majors, were much more useful even for students who will be using the Corwin text. Dawn Hensley and Wheeler Conover Southeast Community College Cumberland, KY 40823
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 11 November 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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