Digital tools and techniques in chemistry

After the two first decades of the 21st century, digital tools and techniques are, in several countries, becoming an integrated part of school and university chemistry teaching. The tools are, according to students, often perceived exciting and fun, but from a teacher’s perspective, they have to enable learning to be relevant and meaningful (Seery & McDonnell, 2013). According to McKnight and colleagues (2016), digital tools and technology can have five different functions: (i) providing efficiencies, (ii) giving students access to broader, deeper and “richer” learning resources, (iii) personalising instruction to fit different learning needs, (iv) connecting people to extend the learning community, and (v) transforming teachers’ role as educators (McKnight et al., 2016, p. 207). In this presentation, these functions will be elaborated on from both a teacher and student perspective through chemistry education projects where digital tools and techniques have been applied to enhance students’ cognitive and affective learning. Visualisation of chemical representations, e.g., molecular structures and reaction mechanisms, is a foundation important for students to master to fully understand chemistry (e.g., Taber, 2018). Spatial ability, i.e., the move between two- and three-dimensional thinking, is complex, and students need to practice it (Buckely, Seery, & Canty, 2018; Harle & Towns, 2011). To practice spatial ability, digital tools as Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) have been applied to visualise chemical representations (Ferrell et al., 2019; Parong & Mayer, 2018), and in the projects, students’ learning has been analysed. Teachers’ use of the tools will be discussed from the TPACK model (Voogt et al, 2013). Students’ and teachers’ perspectives on digital chemistry education will be problematised