Effective Use of this Book – Note to Teachers

The essential philosophy, motivation, and background that have led to the development of this book are highlighted in the Preface. The contextual placement of the subject of materials chemistry is elaborated in the following Note to Students. I wish to highlight here, the relevance and scope of the book, and how best it can be utilized in teaching.

It has been my experience that, even if a classroom lecture is complete and rigorous with detailed exposition of the relevant concepts, derivations, and illustrations, many students will miss some critical links while listening to the lecture and noting down the salient points. Online teaching modes, in increasing vogue today, may be able to address this issue partly with teaching notes or presentation files made accessible to the students; however, absence of the direct personal touch and the physical ambience of the classroom are always felt keenly. This book is formulated in a specific style. The bullet format and to-the-point presentation are designed to project the concepts and ideas in a systematic order; they are an effective vehicle to collect object groups, selected examples or sequential steps in an analytical derivation. The book is meant to effectively supplement, but not replace classroom lectures; it would support the personal study and augment the learning experience of the student, as a natural follow-up to the classes. For the teacher on the other hand, the directed and point-wise formulation in the book should help to streamline and deliver the classroom lectures effectively and evolve directed assessments.

The model exercises collected at the end of the book are grouped into two types for each chapter, ‘content based’ and ‘context based’. The students may be encouraged to start with the content based exercises and develop new ones of their own; this is primarily a learning process. The context based ones on the other hand can serve as the tools to initiate the understanding process. The model exercises can be used to formulate more, of varying levels of complexity.

An important issue that needs to be addressed in a course on Materials Chemistry is the extent to which specific/specialized classes or families of materials need to be discussed. This point is noted briefly in the Preface of the book, and explained further in the Postface. The enormous variety of advanced materials that are known and continue to emerge makes any selective choice within the time constraints of a course, complicated. However, imparting a flavour of specialized materials and their applications is indeed pertinent. An optimal solution is to first cover the basic conceptual framework provided in this book, and follow it up with brief discussions of selected examples of advanced materials of interest in the emerging scenario and context using appropriate review articles or similar resources. Several of the Exercises provide a beginning in this direction.

Happy teaching!