Led by Dmitri Mendeleev
About this course
The second module of the Edexcel GCSE Chemistry course turns to the most useful single object in the discipline — the periodic table — and to the question of what underlying order makes it work.
It is led by Dmitri Mendeleev, who in 1869 arranged the 63 known elements into a table in which chemical similarities recurred periodically across columns, left gaps where the pattern demanded undiscovered elements, and predicted the chemistry of gallium, scandium, and germanium with such accuracy that their later discovery vindicated his arrangement and embedded the periodic table at the centre of chemistry.
The student leaves the module able to describe Mendeleev's original arrangement and the predictions it generated, account for the anomalies he encountered, explain how Moseley's atomic-number resolution corrected them, describe the structure of the modern table, predict electronic configurations for the first 20 elements, and use position to identify metals, non-metals, and chemical behaviour.
Led by Dmitri Mendeleev
The question
How did Mendeleev arrange the 63 elements known in 1869 into a table that not only organised existing chemistry but predicted elements that had not yet been discovered, and what does the modern atomic-number-ordered version of his table tell us about the structure of any element's atoms? The spec asks the student to describe Mendeleev's arrangement and his predictions, account for the anomalies he encountered, explain the meaning of atomic number in the modern table, describe the structure of periods and groups, identify metals and non-metals from position, predict electronic configurations for the first 20 elements, and explain the relationship between configuration and position.
Outcome
the student can describe Mendeleev's arrangement and the predictions he derived, account for his anomalies and Moseley's resolution, describe the structure of the modern periodic table, identify metals and non-metals from position, predict the electronic configuration of any element from H to Ca, and explain how configuration is determined by position. *(Edexcel 1CH0 — Topic 1, spec points 1.13–1.20)*
Sub-units