The USM O=CHem website contains discussions of over 90 topics of interest to students who are studying organic chemistry. Most of these topics involve animations and/or interactive components. In order to utilize this website to its full potential, it is important that you have a browser that supports certain plug-ins as well as JavaScript and Java. The most recent versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer all seem to work well.
This website requires five plug-ins or helper applications that each user must download onto their own computer; Chime, Chem3D, QuickTime, I-Lab and Shockwave. A few pages also require Swiss PDB Viewer or Deep View. To obtain the URLs for downloading these programs as well as several others that may be of interest to chemistry students click on the link "Freeware and Shareware" in the list below. Directions for installing these programs accompany the download.
Many of the topics at this website contain questions that require students to draw chemical structures. Those topics all contain a link entitled "Load the JME Molecular Editor". The JME Molecular Editor is an applet written by Peter Ertl at Novartis Pharma AG. To learn how to use this program, click on the "JME Tutorial" link below.
All the topics available at this website are listed in the O=CHem Directory. Each topic is intended as a supplement to materials found in any of the current organic chemistry textbooks. Now that you know the ground rules for using this site, you can get started by simply clicking the "O=CHem Directory" link below. You may want to set a bookmark to the O=CHem Directory page.