Learning Chemistry with 3D Visualizations Employing Cartoons Agents in Higher Education (original) (raw)

2017

Abstract

Students in higher education usually find it challenging to understand and picture the particulate nature of matter in microscopic level. However, students often face difficulties in that field and how to link that knowledge to macroscopic behaviour. Therefore, the main purpose of this work is to present a specifically designed educational material that focus to the benefits of viewing visualizations to enhance students' conceptual understanding of chemistry concepts. Under this frame, educational material for specific basic chemistry concepts that are taught in the Chemistry course and supplied at the National Technical University of Athens, in which 3D visualizations with cartoons were constructed and employed. The material was designed for in class use from the educator or for core-concept use. Concepts that combine the microscopic level with the symbolic language were chosen. So, specifically 3D dimensional visualizations were made for the atomic orbitals (dxy, dxz, dzy, dz 2), types of solids-ionic structures (crystal of sodium chloride), molecular structures (water), covalent lattice structures (diamond, graphite structures), metallic structures (copper) etc. Since it was planned all constructed applications to run on all functional and most browsers in terms of 3D, so code three js (javascript that supports 3D) was used. Also, the interactive agents "cartoons" Einstein and Curie, were developed from scratch in programs that apply animation in 2D characters, giving them freedom of movement and realism at the same time. In the near future a planned research will be carried out to study and find out how the students' scientific knowledge can be reconstructed in the above mentioned concepts in the Inorganic-General Chemistry course, which is taught at three schools of the National Technical University of Athens, exploiting the developed cognitive and their metacognitive abilities, their spatial ability and their optical encoding.

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