The ChemCollective—Virtual Labs for Introductory Chemistry Courses

A collection of online activities emphasizes the design and interpretation of experiments. Chemistry concepts are abstract and can be difficult to attach to real-world experiences. For this reason, high-school and college chemistry courses focus on a concrete set of problem types that have become canonized in textbooks and standard exams. These problem types emphasize development of the core notational and computational tools of chemistry. Even though these tools may form the underlying procedural knowledge base from which the “real stuff” can be approached, when taught out of contexts that show their utility or that draw connections to core ideas of science, they can appear as a disconnected bag of tricks (1).