- About Us As a teacher in Lower Saxony, Germany, one of
Niehaus' main goals when developing Kalzium (the German word for
Calcium) was to write an application that was both a teaching
and a learning tool. "I want to be able to demonstrate things
and I also want my students to be able to learn things from
Kalzium and to use it as a reference," he says. Kalzium was a
originally developed as a simple interactive table of the
periodic elements but has evolved into a full-featured
application, complete with an equation solver and modified
molecular calculator. Its database contains information on more
than 100 chemical elements, and can be manipulated to show data
in several ways, including mass, density, charge, and name
origin. Kalzium even includes a timeline that allows users to
sort data according to year of discovery. Niehaus uses the Vim
text editor to code Kalzium. "I started using it on Day One and
can no longer use non-extreme editors like Kate. I need all
those crazy shortcuts," he says. "[However], the