Tangible User Interfaces for Educational Use
Benedikt M. Voegtli, Morten Fjeld, Patrick Juchli · Birkhäuser-Verlag eBooks · 2006
This article reports on the many ways that tangible interaction can benefit chemistry education. It describes the development of a tangible user interface (TUI) called “Augmented Chemistry” (AC), gives details of the system’s basic and specialized interactive tools, and outlines its educational context. With these basic tools, users can choose elements from a booklet menu and construct 3D molecular models. The system can currently be used to teach certain aspects of organic molecular chemistry such as the octet rule. Expertise from optics, mathematics, molecular chemistry, software engineering and 3D programming played a role in the design of the system, making it a truly interdisciplinary project. We are currently planning to evaluate AC’s capacity to support effective, user-friendly chemistry education at a vocational school for trainees in the chemical industry. We will compare the system’s educational effectiveness with that of the institution’s established teaching methods.