Lessons
Intro to Organic Chemistry
Hello students and welcome to Organic Chemistry 1! First, let’s begin with some of the basics you will need to succeed in this course. When drawing a molecule, we use lines to indicate bonds and dots to indicate electrons. This is also known as the Lewis Structure:
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Naming Alkanes
Naming molecules using the IUPAC naming convention is one of the first lessons taught in Organic Chemistry! Watch this video for a quick lesson on naming Alkane molecules.
Alkane molecules are molecules with a carbon backbone made up of single bonds. The name of the alkane molecule depends on how many carbon atoms are in it's backbone or skeleton. For quick reference, the basic names of the first...
Naming Alkenes
Check out our lesson on naming Alkene molecules using IUPAC naming conventions! Be sure to watch our other video about Alkane naming as some of the content here builds off this lesson. Alkene molecules are very similar to Alkane molecules: both are molecules with a carbon backbone. However, Alkene molecules have at least 1 double bond located between two carbon atoms compared to Alkane mol...
Hydrohalogenation Reactions
Our first video covering reactions in Organic Chemistry! Watch this lesson on hydrohalogenation of alkenes using HBr and HBR with ROOR, one of the first addition reactions taught in organic chemistry. A key concept covered in this lesson is carbon priority, which is a way of describing how many carbon-carbon bonds a carbon atom has. A carbon atom with a carbon priority of 3 (tertiary) would mean t...
Resonance Structures
Try our Resonance Solver Study Tool
Moving electrons around is a fundamental part of organic chemistry. When we draw a molecule using bond-line structures, we see that there is typically a carbon backbone comprised of single bonds with some double bonds and other atoms (like O and ...
Bond Types and Orbitals
In organic chemistry, almost every bond encountered will be a covalent bond. A covalent bond means that electrons are shared between the 2 atoms. This is in contrast to an ionic bond where one atom is much more electronegative than the other atom and often takes all of the electrons when the bond is broken. There are 3 bonds you will see in organic chemistry: single ...
Chirality
When drawing 2D images of molecules, we can forget that these molecules exist in 3D space. Try drawing 1-bromo-1-chloroethane, it should look something like this: