A Computational Chemistry Course for Teachers: From Research Laboratories to High-School Chemistry Teaching

Abstract

Computational chemistry (CC) is an important and essential area within chemical sciences. Over the years, CC has developed rapidly and played a significant role in chemistry research. In addition to the centrality of CC in the chemical sciences, teachers and students should be exposed to contemporary research for many reasons. These reasons include elevating student motivation to study science and engineering and increasing student interest in scientifically oriented careers. For teachers, contemporary research can trigger their professional development and keep them up to date with current research in their teaching field. However, the integration of CC tools within chemistry education can be challenging for both teachers and students. Here we describe a course on CC for high-school teachers. The goal was to introduce the teachers to contemporary CC contents and tools and motivate them to utilize their knowledge in the teaching of chemistry. We describe the course structure and contents that included lectures, hands-on workshop exercises, and assignments. The rationale behind each part of the course is detailed and the workshop instructions that were conducted using the free Avogadro software are completely presented in the Supporting Information. The course evaluation indicated that teachers improved their contemporary CC content knowledge and were satisfied with how the course contributed to their chemistry teaching.

Integrating Computational Chemistry into Secondary School Lessons

“…The teachers should bear the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) to be successful in implementing CC in the classroom. For this activity to be implemented as a common teaching tool, extensive webinars and courses aimed specifically at teachers, such as proposed by Traube et al, should be made to support their confidence in teaching this way.…”

“…Traube and Blonder tried to overcome the last two challenges by designing an online course for upper-secondary-school teachers, aiming at getting them excited to use CC in their classrooms. Our work shows that upper-secondary students can benefit from incorporating CC in teaching, having a positive influence on their attitude toward often daunting general chemistry.…”

Modes of technology integration in chemistry teaching: theory and practice

“…The advantage of CC is that the calculation results can be easily visualized and students can gain insights from them (Grushow and Reeves, 2019). Using CC can provide chemistry teachers with an opportunity to present to their students the numerical justification for a variety of problems and phenomena, e.g., interactions between molecules and the thermodynamic principle of minimum of energy (Traube and Blonder, 2023). In addition, training chemistry teachers to use and implement CC software in their teaching significantly contributed to their contemporary content knowledge in chemistry, which was reflected in their motivation to integrate these tools in class (Traube and Blonder, 2023).…”

“…Using CC can provide chemistry teachers with an opportunity to present to their students the numerical justification for a variety of problems and phenomena, e.g., interactions between molecules and the thermodynamic principle of minimum of energy (Traube and Blonder, 2023). In addition, training chemistry teachers to use and implement CC software in their teaching significantly contributed to their contemporary content knowledge in chemistry, which was reflected in their motivation to integrate these tools in class (Traube and Blonder, 2023). Regarding the benefits of using CC methods, there is not much evidence of their use, and the available evidence mainly refers to undergraduate students (Silva et al, 2015;Esselman and Hill, 2016;Snyder and Kucukkal, 2021).…”

“…The field of computational chemistry has been applied by researchers to solve contemporary problems, for example, for finding the structure of proteins (Zheng et al, 2018), for determining the mechanisms of chemical reactions (Cheng et al, 2015), and for discovering new drugs (Leelananda and Lindert, 2016). In education, computational methods can convey contemporary science knowledge to teachers and help students visualize and understand chemical phenomena (Traube and Blonder, 2023).…”