| Project | ChemViz |
| Contact | Lisa Bievenue / Juan Moran |
| bievenue@ncsa.uiuc.edu | |
| URL | http://chemviz.ncsa.uiuc.edu |
| Project description | ChemViz is a set of scientific visualization tools and curriculum materials designed to make computational chemistry accessible to high school and undergraduate teachers and students. Students use ChemViz as a web-based computational laboratory for designing experiments which can answer their questions concerning such abstract concepts as electrons, atoms, molecules, and chemical bonding. By generating images of the electron densities for various combinations of atoms, students are able to understand in concrete terms the differences between equal and unequal sharing of electrons, bonding and antibonding orbitals, strong and weak bonds, and the energy differences of atoms at appropriate and inappropriate bond distances and angles. Virtually any concept involving chemical bonding could be explored using the computational tools. |
| Theoretical background | This project, Visualizations in Teaching Chemistry (ChemViz), grew out of the quest to discover ways to render certain basic concepts of chemistry more vivid and visible to young learners. Due to the microscopic nature of chemistry, many of its basic constructs and processes are "invisible" to students. The project's original principal investigator, Dr. Nora Sabelli, a professor of chemistry, pointed out the contrast between chemistry and physics and biology education (Sabelli, 1991): "In physics and biology, mechanistic simulations have been used and studied extensively, whereas in chemistry we cannot draw on students' previous intuition to aid in their understanding. We all learn over a long time the intuitive skills needed to count, measure, gauge speed and force, understand motion, birth, death and growth, among other concepts. These concepts (and associated misconceptions) are macroscopic in nature and therefore observable; this is not true of many of the basic concepts of modern chemistry as it is taught now, even at the introductory level. When we see chemical reactions (cooking, moving cars, sun-burning, healing) we do not see what we are taught in chemistry and therefore, often enough we do not see 'chemistry' at all." Historically, chemistry educators have tried to render chemical structures and processes more visible through the use of vivid, albeit excessively simple, visual metaphors such as the solar system serving as a model of the structure of an atom. While marginally useful in early stages of learning, such metaphors eventually interfere with a rich understanding of basic chemical concepts. More recent pedagogical work has suggested that computer-generated three-dimensional animations of certain basic processes, molecular bonding for example, are capable of providing students with this type of richer visualization (e.g., Sabelli, 1991). It has also been suggested that such visualizations help students obtain a better grasp of the abstract aspects of chemistry, such as calculating algorithmically-based solutions to problems.Building on these more recent findings, the investigators of the project proposed a pedagogical approach that starts with a computational experiment on an abstract concept, and then proceeds to present the model (the visualization) to interpret the experiment. The computational experiment approach allows, in contrast to theory and experimentation, students to explore how the "laws" of chemistry behave. In a computational experiment students can do simulations which visually and dynamically replicate the behavior of a complex chemical process. An example, prevalent in this project, is the numerical solution to the Schrödinger equation. In a computational experiment, students learn by doing because they can manipulate their learning environment, testing different computations against models in an iterative fashion. |
| Challenges | We are currently working on finding or developing a tool to display 3D images of molecular data via the Web. |
| Partnership |