Structure Drawing Software

Yesterday, I hosted an extra-curricular workshop for my students to expose them to the chemistry structure drawing freeware put out by Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD). The current version of Chemsketch is very impressive. I was hoping that students would be interested in drawing structures for their lab reports. I had the technology folks download the software onto the computers in a computer classroom. About a third of my 57 Organic Chemistry students stopped in, picked up a tutorial I had put together (pdf file of tutorial), and played with the program. They seemed to catch on very quickly to Chemsketch’s way of doing things and there were duly impressed with the nice neat structures they could create. I am looking forward to seeing Chemsketch drawings show up on their lab reports. The latest version is Chemsketch 11.0. I am a Chemdraw (CambridgeSoft) user myself since I wrote my doctoral thesis with Chemdraw in 1991. I currently use Chemdraw 4.5 for my teaching. I am aware of a few other structure drawing software programs out there such as Marvin (ChemAxon), Jmol (sourceforge), and Isis Draw (MDL) but I do not have much experience with them. Structure drawing is an important component of online data sharing and experimental reporting. The question is how much to expect of students to learn and to use these technologies.