Synthesis, characterization and thermal behavior on solid tartrates of light trivalent lanthanides
Solid state Ln–L compounds, where Ln stands for light trivalent lanthanides (L–Gd) and L is tartrate, have been synthesized. Thermogravimetry and differential thermal analysis (TG/DTA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray powder diffractometry, elemental analysis and complexometry were used to characterize and to study the thermal behaviour of these compounds. The results led to information about the composition, dehydration and thermal decomposition of the isolated compounds.
Solid-state 2-methoxybenzoates of light trivalent lanthanides
Solid-state LnL3 compounds, where L is 2-methoxybenzoate and Ln is light trivalent lanthanides, have been synthesized. Thermogravimetry (TG), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), X-ray powder diffractometry, infrared spectroscopy and elementary analysis were used to characterize and to study the thermal behaviour of these compounds. The results led to information on the composition, dehydration, thermal stability and thermal decomposition of the isolated compounds. On heating these complexes decompose in three (Ce, Pr) or five (La, Nd, Sm) steps with the formation of the respective oxide: CeO2, Pr6O11 and Ln2O3 (Ln=La, Nd, Sm) as final residues. The theoretical and experimental spectroscopic study suggests predominantly the ionic bond between the ligand and metallic center.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.