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"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble." -- P.A.M. Dirac, 1929
Want to take it for a spin? If so, you can contact the site administrator at gotwals@ncssm.edu for guest access. This gives you approximately two (2) minutes of computing time per job.
Welcome to the NCHSCCS! Support Materials Readings, Activities, and Labs
The North Carolina High School Computational Chemistry Server is a research-grade scientific workstation that contains two of the most widely used research software programs (Gaussian and MOPAC) for calculating the structure and properties of chemical molecules. This resource is provided free of charge to all students and teachers in the State of North Carolina. Students in public, private, parochial, charter, and home schools are all eligible to use this resource.

There are two types of accounts available for this resource:

  1. Classroom accounts: these accounts are available to chemistry teachers who desire to provide students with an opportunity to explore the technologies, techniques, and tools of computational chemistry. These accounts are provided over a limited timeframe, and job limits are set at five (5) minutes for a single run, with 20 minutes of total CPU time per student.
  2. Research accounts: these accounts are available to individual students or teams of students wishing to pursue an independent research project. Job limits are set following discussion with the NCHSCCS project managers.

Information for Users

  1. General Frequently Asked Questions
  2. Quickstart Tutorial (PDF) (Note: this tutorial has pictures with an older interface, but should still be useful
  3. Complete Users Guide (PDF): approximately 100 pages in length, but quite useful!
  4. WebMO Molecular Editor tutorial: help with building molecules

Information for Students

  1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for Students

Information for Teachers

  1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for Teachers
  2. Requesting Classroom Accounts
  3. Conference Article: "Integrating Computational Chemistry into the General Chemistry Curriculum
  4. Journal of Student Computational Chemistry: North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Spring 2007
  1. Case Study: Vibrational Frequencies of Water
  2. Case Study: Atomic Orbitals Lab
  3. Case Study: Determination of Molecular Geometries Lab
  4. Reading: A Quick Guide to Understanding the "Configure" window (PDF): this document provides a very brief introduction to computational chemistry, with a focus on understanding the jobs configuration window on the server
  5. Confirming and Visualization Lewis Dot Structures
With appreciation to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund , the North Carolina Science, Mathematics and Technology Education Center and Gaussian, Inc. for their funding support!