Chemist-virtual chem lab PDF

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Danielle Legault EDCI 767 The Great App Experiment: CHEMIST by THIX

CHEMIST by THIX is an app that claims to be a virtual chemistry lab. It is “stocked” with 180 inorganic and 60 organic chemicals that can be combined and experimented with. CHEMIST is found in the apple App store or on Google Play and will work on smartphones and tablets. User beware; the app does come at a price. I paid $11.99 to demo this app, so downloading it for multiple iPads in a classroom could get expensive quickly and there are no free versions available. This app would be the best fit in an upper level secondary classroom, as the app itself provides little to no guidance. By grade 12 especially, students will be much more familiar with the lab equipment and lab processes they might encounter in this app. For lower secondary grades, a much more guided, teacher-led demonstration of the app would be needed. In particular, it would be a fantastic resource to support the following grades and topics: • Science 10: Energy change in chemical processes • Science 10: Transformation of energy • Chemistry 11: Most topics, but specifically reactions and solubility • Chemistry 12: Most, if not all, topics, but specifically reaction rate and catalysts CHEMIST provides students, and teachers, a way to execute chemical reactions without the safety or cost-related risks of performing the reactions in the classroom. Plus, the app gives the user the ability to virtually control the lab environment and the reagents. Users can adjust the temperature and air composition of the laboratory, increase the speed of time, or directly add heat, cooling, or catalysts to a reaction. Changes in these variables directly influence the state of reagents and the speed of reactions in the virtual lab, which makes this a potential tool for studying reaction rates. Carrying out an experiment virtually could also give students a sense of what

Danielle Legault EDCI 767 to expect before performing a lab, so teachers could consider assigning a virtual lab as part of a pre-lab exercise. Finally, students could use CHEMIST to investigate the process of designing their own experiment or demonstration, which could later even be adapted to the real-world lab with the guidance of a teacher. Thankfully, the app has a corresponding user guide that you can download from their website, https://thix.co/chemist/. Without this, it would have been difficult figuring out the intricacies of how to carry out virtual experiments. The iPhone 6 screen was also too small, which led to much frustration trying to tap the small arrows and buttons to measure reagents and combine chemicals. The user experience on a larger iPad or tablet would have been much smoother. The app was difficult to use on its own; it has no built in prompts or guides as to what reactions could be created from the available chemicals. The app would be more useful to students if teachers had a prepared list of reactions for students to try out. It is important to note that while programming has made this app an incredibly useful tool, the app itself is not necessarily accountable to the laws and nuances of chemistry. Reviewers from past versions of CHEMIST have expressed, with outrage, how particular reactions did not perform as the reviewer had anticipated. I was unable to verify these claims in the current version, but teachers should be aware that these types of errors could exist. Teachers should demo these reactions on the app themselves, so that they can be sure of the outcomes. However, these discrepancies could also serve as valuable examples to demonstrate to students how simulation can vary from real-life, especially given how many more variables exist in the real-world. The app gives users a quick, safe, and accessible way to observe reactions. For many chemistry concepts, it would be a useful tool for facilitating observation using the Predict-Observe-Explain approach. Educators should still proceed with caution, as although the virtual lab

Danielle Legault EDCI 767 may help students conceptualize certain chemistry concepts, it is not a true replacement for hands-on laboratory experience. It is still important for students to use the “real-life” lab to gain experience with lab equipment, protocols, and in developing their “real-life” lab skills....