SisMol3D: desenvolvimento de um Software Educacional para o ensino de estruturas moleculares em química

Abstract

The understanding of much of the modern world is based on the knowledge of the sciences. In particular, chemistry is of central importance to understanding the phenomena which occur all around us. However, despite the importance of chemistry in everyday life, many adults have little interest or even feel frightened by the word "chemistry". The lack of interest of these individuals for the subject may be associated with a poor comprehension of the basic concepts in chemistry. This situation is initiated when they have their first contact with the discipline of chemistry, which in Brazil occurs during high school. It is possible that the explanation of some of the course contents made by teachers without state-of-the-art educational resources is among the factors that contribute to these difficulties. For instance, the study of molecular geometries presents several difficulties to the student due to its abstract nature. In order to make the teaching-learning process of this kind of content easier, it is necessary to ally the utilization of traditional teaching methodologies with more modern devices such as computers and educational software. The work presented was originally performed with the goal for directly helping teaching/learning purposes in high school chemistry. In this work, we present the elaboration, development and evaluation of a new free package of educational software. It is expected that the development provide a valuable auxiliary educational tool for high school chemistry teachers and students. In addition, the software developed can facilitate the teaching/learning process of abstract contents which are difficult to be taught/learned using only the traditional tools, e.g., books and black board classes.