Chemistry takes advantage of new technologies

New technologies are increasingly present in everyday life. And an exemplary way of adapting it to teaching to make theoretical knowledge more accessible comes from four professors of the Chemistry Degree at the UR.

Héctor Busto observed the students’ difficulty in ‘seeing’ molecules in 3D because in books, logically, they appear in two dimensions, and the spatial arrangement is very important to understand their chemical reaction. For this reason, he and Fayna García, together with other teachers and Jorge R. López from CreativiTIC, have developed a teaching innovation project called ‘Augmented Reality in Chemistry Teaching: Implementation in the Classroom and Evaluation of its Impact’ that solves that problem.

«Chemistry is very abstract and, with the tool that we have applied, an app that is carried on the mobile phone or tablet detects the drawing of the two-dimensional molecule in the book and converts it into three-dimensional so that everything can be understood much more easily» .

The CreativiTIC MetAClass application already existed and was used in Primary Education, but now the work of Héctor Busto has also implemented it in the study of Chemistry.

For her part, teacher Elena Olmos has relied on the Whiteboard app to reinforce concepts in her students through small challenges (for example, correcting erroneous formulas) that are carried out online, and in which some students can comment, correct each other, interact… It is a way of doing tasks as a team and at a distance.

Whiteboards and contests

«In addition, after finishing each topic, I leave the board blank so that they can write possible questions for the exam. It is a way to work on the ability to synthesize and for them to see their level of knowledge of the subject,” says Olmos.

Teresa Tena, Analytical Chemistry teacher, has also used new technologies (One Note and Kahoot tools) to try to keep her students up to date with the subject “because knowledge of one topic is necessary to understand the next,” she points out. . And to do this, instead of traditional problem booklets, she prepares them virtually, in the cloud, so that the student always has them at her disposal. “And so, I can see the evolution and what has not been clear,” she says.

Additionally, when a lesson ends, he poses a contest with questions. “They see what is most relevant, they maintain interest in learning, in being able to build the knowledge of the next person on that knowledge and I see how they are doing,” explains the teacher, in a group work. Previously, she provided videos to students on the subject and suggested that students also make them “but it was a significant workload, so we have replaced it with making a poster.”