Virtual Worlds and Their Uses in Chemical Education
Kurt Winkelmann · ACS symposium series · 2013
Virtual worlds have a unique capacity to immerse the user in an online community. This experience is helping students learn many subjects, including chemistry. This chapter introduces virtual worlds with special attention paid to Second Life, the most popular virtual world used in education. The next chapter section explains various efforts by educators to enhance their courses with Second Life and the benefits of doing so. The author then describes why virtual laboratory experiments are well-suited for college chemistry courses and presents preliminary results of a study in which chemistry students performed an experiment in Second Life .