This Concept Builder is certain to provide students a rigorous workout with understanding intermolecular forces. The emphasis is on three such forces - London dispersion forces, dipole-dipole interactions, and hydrogen bonding. Other forces that hold particles together in the solid state are not addressed in this activity.

Students must be able to characterize these three types of intermolecular forces, giving particular attention to the mechanisms that produce such forces and the criteria for determining the existence of such forces for various substances. Students will have to use a Lewis structure (provided) and an electronegativity table to determine the presence/absence of polar bonds and whether the substance consists of polar or nonpolar molecules. Finally, students will need to be able to rank the relative strength of the intermolecular forces for three susbtances if given their formulas.

There are three activities in this Concept Builder. Those three activities are differentiated as follows:

• Paragraph Completion: Question Groups 1-3 ... Complete a paragraph by selecting words and phrases from a bank. Each paragraph targets a different intermolecular force type - London dispersion forces, dipole-dipole interactions, and hydrogen bonding.
• Force Identification: Question Groups 4-9 ... Given a Lewis electron dot structure for a substance, identify if there are polar bonds present, determine if the molecule is polar or non-polar, and identify the types of intermolecular forces in the substance.
• Match That Color: Question Groups 10-13 ... Given the formula of three strategically-chosen substances, rank the substances in order of the strength of their intermolecular forces.

(NOTE: on 12/5/2024, question group 5 was removed from the Concept Builder. This leaves the second activity with only five Question Groups.)

The questions can be found on our Questions page. We encourage teachers who are considering the use of this Concept Builder in their class to either preview the Questions (Task Tracker Teachers only) or (better yet) try the Concept Builder itself.

Like all our Concept Builders, this Concept Builder utilizes a variety of strategies to make each student's experience different. The ordering of questions is random (particularly for the second and third activity). The Question number assigned to each question is scrambled. For instance, two side-by-side students will not have the same question for question number three. And questions are organized into "groups" with questions within the same group being very similar (for instance, they may all be molecules with an asymmetric geometry and non-polar bonds) but not identical. And finally, the multiple choice answer options are scrambled each time the question is delivered to the students' screen.

The Concept Builder also keeps track of student progress. It requires that students demonstrate a mastery of questions in each Question Group. If they miss a question from one group, then they will have to answer two consecutive questions correctly in order to demonstrate mastery. Progress is displayed in the progress report on the right side of the Concept Builder (for Task Tracker users). A star indicates a demonstration of mastery. A question with a red background indicates that the student has missed the question. And a question with a yellow background means that the student must get one more question from that Question Group correctly answered in order to obtain a star. When an activity is completed, the student will be awarded a Trophy. This Trophy is displayed on the Main Menu screen (for Task Tracker users). These strategies make the Concept Builder an ideal addition to the 1:1 classroom and other settings in which computers are readily available. 

In order to complete an activity, a student must correctly analyze each question of that activity. If a student's analysis is incorrect, then the student will have to correctly analyze the same or very similar question twice in order to successfully complete the activity. This approach provides the student extra practice on questions for which they exhibited difficulty. As a student progresses through an activity, a system of stars and other indicators are used to indicate progress on the activity. A star is an indicator of correctly analyzing the question. Once a star is earned, that question is removed from the que of questions to be analyzed. Each situation is color-coded with either a yellow or a red box. A red box indicates that the student has incorrectly analyzed the question and will have to correctly analyze it twice before earning a star. A yellow box is an indicator that the question must be correctly analyzed one time in order to earn a star. Once every question of a difficulty level has been analyzed, the student earns a Trophy which is displayed on the Main Menu. This system of stars and trophies allows a teacher to easily check-off student progress or offer credit for completing assigned activities.

The most valuable (and most overlooked) aspect of this Concept Builder is the Help Me! feature. Each question group is accompanied by a Help page that discusses the specifics of the question. This Help feature transforms the activity from a question-answering activity into a concept-building activity. The student who takes the time to use the Help pages can be transformed from a guesser to a learner and from an unsure student to a confident student. The "meat and potatoes" of the Help pages are in the sections titled "How to Think About This Situation:" Students need to be encouraged by teachers to use the Help Me! button and to read this section of the page. A student that takes time to reflect upon how they are answering the question and how an expert would think about the situation can transform their naivete into expertise.