This afternoon I spent a little time putting together an idea for an animation to describe balancing equations. It would ultimately be interactive, with the students hitting the "Add a mole" buttons themselves, but this is just meant to be a simple demo. I wish I could say that I am such a devoted adjunct assistant professor that I spend my Sundays making interactive Flash animations for my students (if you've been following for awhile then you've seen that I do make animations for them, but they're low-budget Keynote jobbies), but in actuality this is brainstorming for an all-digital general chemistry textbook that I am lucky to have been asked to contribute to. The challenge for this particular animation is that the students using this textbook will not have seen molecular structures before, so I can't use them to demonstrate the reaction stoichiometry as I usually do. Never have my two jobs been so overlapping, but I think that's why I was chosen for this book. More animations to come soon!