Creative Molecular Model Design for Chemistry Edutainment
Wanwan Li · 2022
Since 3D molecular structure visualization is important for chemistry education, lots of successful works have been focused on molecular visualization. However, most of the existing research works consider the pre-defined types of chemical bonds and reassembling various kinds of bounds together to construct a 3D molecular structure using the standard ball-and-stick model. Although, this approach is good enough to visualize realistic molecular structures, it losses the generality to reveal the mechanism that how atoms are formed into a molecule from electrical explanations during the molecule design process. At the same time, no existing research works have explored how to generalize this visualization technique by introducing the entertainment elements in children’s chemistry education. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to visualize molecular structure in 3D space by minimizing the electric field energy where the optimization steps yield a realistic explanation that how a molecular structure is formed in nature, helping the students understand more about the dynamic properties of molecules. In the meantime, we apply our technique to creative molecular model design for chemistry edutainment.