Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life
Demystify the carbon-based world around you. Learn how to draw and interpret chemical formulas, spot key molecular structures, and understand the everyday chemistry behind food, medicines, and plastics.
Like Duolingo, but for Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
21 levels across 3 sections, about 42 minutes end to end, roughly 8 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Spotting Organic Molecules Around You, Constructing Formulas and Functional Groups, and How Molecular Architecture Drives the World. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life
- Carbon's unique ability to bond with itself into long chains and rings defines organic chemistry
- Molecules built on other elements without carbon backbones belong to inorganic chemistry
- Carbon consistently forms four covalent bonds to be stable
- A double bond counts as two bonds toward carbon's four-bond limit
- A carbon with five bonds is impossible under stable organic rules
- Chemists omit the letter 'C' to keep complex backbones uncluttered and easy to read
- Every bend, corner, and open end of a zigzag line represents a carbon atom
- The lines between corners represent shared covalent bonds
- Hydrogens bonded to carbon are left unwritten to keep drawings clean
- You find missing hydrogens by subtracting drawn bonds from four
- A carbon showing two single bonds must have two hidden hydrogens attached
- End carbons have one drawn bond, meaning each holds three hydrogens (3 + 3 = 6)
- The middle corner has two drawn bonds, meaning it holds two hydrogens
- Summing hidden hydrogens across all vertices reveals the full molecular formula
- A molecular formula only tallies the total number of each atom
- A structural formula shows how the atoms link to one another in physical space
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
If a molecule is built from elements like iron or sulfur without any carbon backbone, where does it belong?
Get it right to open this lesson and 20 more in the app.
Where Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life takes you
- 1
Spotting Organic Molecules Around You
- Reading Carbon's Hidden Skeleton
- Decoding Household Chemical Formulas
- 2
Constructing Formulas and Functional Groups
- Building Hydrocarbon Chains and Rings
- The Functional Group Toolkit
- 3
How Molecular Architecture Drives the World
- Predicting Solubility and Cleansing Power
- 3D Shape, Chirality, and Drug Action
- Polymers: Chaining Small Formulas into Materials
3 sections · 7 units · 21 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Organic Chemistry in Everyday Life is taught in the The Bestie style: your friend who just gets it. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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