Science in 3D. Learning chemistry by applying augmented reality activities

Abstract

The students that are joining the Chemistry course are students from the first semester of college and come from high school with very heterogeneous knowledge and skills. Usually, their proficiency in the science area's disciplinary skills is very low, being the fact that they possess limited abstraction capacities a central problem because this prevents them from visualizing molecules, phenomena, and microstructures correctly. According to data obtained by the Institutional Effectiveness Department, the average failure rate for this class is near 20%. This project develops five activities where virtual reality and augmented reality technologies are used as an innovative didactic strategy in the Chemistry course. These activities were applied to pilot and control groups where the results show at a 95% level of confidence that the grades' medians in groups where these technologies were used during class are higher than those in groups with traditional teaching. Thus, virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, based on content and disciplinary and transversal skills from the Chemistry course managed to help the students get a higher proficiency level in these.