ChemPad

Organic chemistry is a hard course. Early in their college studies, students who wish to pursue a career in medicine must have a solid understanding of organic chemistry and, perhaps more importantly to the students, a good grade in organic chemistry. The difficulty of the material prevents many students from continuing with this career path. One of the major difficulties for students in organic chemistry is understanding the three-dimensional nature of molecules. Students usually have no background in three-dimensional visualization and have great difficulty converting between the two-dimensional drawings used in text books and on classroom blackboards to represent molecules and their three-dimensional structures. Without this understanding, to survive the course, students must memorize a large vocabulary of molecules and rules to fake an understanding of the three-dimensional structures. Although this is possible for some, good students and good chemists tend to learn to visualize the molecules in three dimensions and apply a much simpler set of rules to these visualizations.

To address students' need for three-dimensional visualization in chemistry at Brown, University President Ruth Simmons authorized $50,000 of Atlantic Philanthropies funding to develop a new piece of educational technology targeted at this goal. This resulted in Professor Matthew Zimmt's Chemistry 35 course this spring being equipped with ChemPad, a Tablet PC application shown above. ChemPad assists students learning to visualize molecules from standard two-dimensional drawings as a digital substitute for physical ball-and-stick modelling kits. Students can build the same structures they would with the modelling kit and see the same 3D features of the molecules. However, students using ChemPad can construct these models much quicker than with a physical model and receive interactive feedback about their 3D intuitions which would otherwise be unavailable without a TA or a professor available. By using the visualization assistance ChemPad offers to solve a 3D thinking task, students develop the skills to reach correct intuitions without assistance.

Project status: Active

Project Home Page: http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/graphics/research/chempad/home.html