Applications of the Cambridge Structural Database in chemical education

The Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) is a vast and ever growing compendium of accurate three-dimensional structures that has massive chemical diversity across organic and metal–organic compounds. For these reasons, the CSD is finding significant uses in chemical education, and these applications are reviewed. As part of the teaching initiative of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), a teaching subset of more than 500 CSD structures has been created that illustrate key chemical concepts, and a number of teaching modules have been devised that make use of this subset in a teaching environment. All of this material is freely available from the CCDC website, and the subset can be freely viewed and interrogated using WebCSD, an internet application for searching and displaying CSD information content. In some cases, however, the complete CSD System is required for specific educational applications, and some examples of these more extensive teaching modules are also discussed. The educational value of visualizing real three-dimensional structures, and of handling real experimental results, is stressed throughout.