I am sure there are a lot of students out there in MakeUseOf land. So when I came across pElement, I knew I had to share it with the group. pElement is an interactive periodic table of the elements. It provides you with all the data you need for your chemistry or other science class. Maybe you are a closet geek and you need to know certain facts about the elements. Using this to complete your homework is a lot more fun than staring at a large chart.

Either which way, pElement is for you. Let’s check it out. You can download the application via CNet from here and the project’s home page is here.

After you download and install the 1.7 MB file you will be able to run it. When you run pElement you will see this:

For those of you who have not been to a junior high school science class, this is the period table of the elements. It shows us each element’s atomic number, symbol, name, atomic weight as well as other information like physical information, chemical information, nuclear information, general information, electron information and crystal structure information.

The majority of us will not need this information on a daily basis but for a student who needs a quick study chemistry solution, or a scientist, this can be invaluable.

By clicking on a element you can bring up its properties like so:

I clicked on Au, the abbreviation for Aurum; more commonly known as gold. We see its statistics here and we can click on each of the buttons at the top of the info window to see more like so:

The physical information tells us gold’s melting and boiling point as well as some other statistics that are over my head. There are 4 more pages accessible for gold’s physical properties accessible by clicking the black right arrow at the bottom of the window.

Clicking on the chemical button for gold displays this:

Here, we see things like the atomic radius, gold’s oxidation states and it’s effective nuclear charge. I remember memorizing that for a college course! The other tabs work the same way and allow for you to see a wide range of information. There are buttons on the right hand side of the interface that allow us to see the element classes, forms as well as search for elements and view the help or extras section.

Clicking on classes shows us how the table of elements is broken down into similar elements. When you click it you will see the chart below:

Next, clicking on forms shows us what physical form each element is (solid, liquid or gas). You can see the chart below:

The Find dialogue box works by clicking on it and specifying what you are looking for like so:

And on clicking Find, the application quickly returned the element platinum as seen below:

And the last menu before help is Extras. The extra menu contains the other charts that you may find useful like unit conversions, fundamental constants and more. You can see the full list below:

I wish I had something like this when I was going to school! And you can be sure I will let my daughter use this and any other tool to aid in her education.

Do you a similar tool to help cram for a Chemistry test? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged: education • students • study • study tools