OCRA - Authentic mobile application for enhancing the value of mobile learning in organic chemistry

Mobile learning has now become a new phenomenon in education as most mobile devices, especially smartphones and tablets, can run user-friendly mobile applications. Moreover, most mobile devices are affordable and equipped with technical specifications that enable the download of simple mobile applications to enhance learning. This paper discusses the application of a prototype mobile application, known as the Organic Chemistry Reaction Application (OCRA), which has been designed to run on any mobile devices with touch screen commands. The OCRA is a unique mobile application that allows its users to create their own organic molecules using hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and halogen atoms. In OCRA, the users are able to explicitly form and break chemical bond between atoms by sliding their fingers to move the electrons or atom, and predict logically the mechanics of three fundamental organic mechanism reactions - addition, substitution, and elimination. Users can use the touch screen feature to demonstrate the organic reaction mechanism explicitly through an electron moving technique, which is used to conceptually visualize the mechanistic steps in organic reaction mechanism. This enables the users to understand the macroscopic and microscopic concepts of organic reaction mechanism. Besides, the OCRA is a game-like mobile application with the objective of acquiring correct answers by achieving specific goals. It uses a touch screen feature to demonstrate the organic reaction mechanism explicitly, while the electron moving technique is employed to conceptually visualize the mechanistic steps in an organic reaction mechanism. The utilization of OCRA, therefore, is as an alternative tool to learn and understand organic reaction mechanism. This prototype is a user controlled tool, which provides convenience and flexibility besides being capable of enhancing a user's confidence in learning organic reaction mechanism. Hence, the OCRA is a practical example of a mobile application that has been innovatively designed to enhance the value of e-learning in the educational context