The value of a good beginning -
learning about chemistry starting with
a 3-D periodic table - can't be overestimated

The periodic table is three-dimensional. You wouldn't know it by all the flat charts around. It has been from the beginning of element data arrangements that showed their periodicity.

The very first published periodic table with the elements arranged in the order of their weights - plus relating them by other properties - was the creation of a French geologist, Alexandre-Emile Beguyer de Chancourtois. He aligned the elements on the outside of a tube, in a spiral. The same principle holds today.

Since then, for printing in books and on posters, the flat chart has become so ubiquitous that most assume that this is the correct representation. Chemists and students of chemistry depend on these flat charts for convenience.

This excellent solution would not present a problem, except that it also used for introducing the periodic table to beginning students. Unfortunately, when flattened, it is both confusing and disjointed, and when one begins to associate it with that Periodic Law, the table is also simply wrong in many places. By providing an unstable foundation for beginners, and introducing (reinforcing?) doubt in authority, the periodic table makes a bad first impression.

As introduction to the study of cartography must start with the globe before proceeding to the various necessary projections, the correct, and 3-D, periodic table will provide the same view of reality. While all the varied static and/or interactive flat periodic table charts must be used and relied upon if anyone is to take up chemistry seriously, the way to avoid the establishment of distrust of the content of chemistry teaching is to pre-empt students’ objections to the flat table. The lesson before the introduction of the flat table in beginning chemistry is precisely the time to do this.

Both Scaffolding and Inquiry Based teaching strategies work well to to bridge the informational gap between the almost universally negative pre-conceptions of the periodic table and its actualities, teaching using the standard periodic table in proper perspective by revealing its dimensional (historical) roots.

We hope that your Alexander Arrangement of Elements lesson will help students to learn about the periodic table faster and better, and make teaching easier.