Abstract:

Cartoons constitute an appealing teaching method to introduce unusual and amazing activities that could enhance learning and students’ participation also in Higher Education. Cartoons have the power to draw attention and come to the specific point quickly. When they are placed in educational material that employ 3d visualizations, they provide by definition an interesting learning tool in Sciences (Chemistry), which provide opportunities for feedback against alternative ideas throughout the learning process and provide valuable information regarding the students misconceptions and how they “overtake” them.

Students in higher education find it challenging to understand and picture the particulate nature of matter in microscopic level. Often students face difficulties in that area and how to link that knowledge to macroscopic behavior. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to present a specifically designed educational material that focus to the benefits of viewing visualizations to enhance students’ conceptual understanding of chemistry concepts.

Under this frame, educational material for specific basic chemistry concepts that are taught in the Inorganic Chemistry course and supplied at the National Technical University of Athens, which employ 3d visualizations with cartoons was constructed. The material was designed for class use from the educator or for core –concept use. Concepts that combine the microscopic level with the symbolic language were chosen. So, specifically 3d dimensional visualizations were made for the atomic orbitals (dxy, dxz, dzy, dz2), types of solids - ionic structures (crystal of sodium chloride), molecular structures (water), covalent lattice structures (diamond, graphite structures), metallic structures (copper) etc. Since it was planned all constructed applications to run on all functional and most browsers in terms of 3D, code three js (javascript that supports 3d) was used. Also the interactive agents "cartoons" were developed from scratch that apply 3D animations in 2D characters (commercial and free software), giving them freedom of movement and realism at the same time. The main purpose of the educational material is to up to a point to perform functions such as representing, emphasizing, pointing, describing, and expand difficult concepts that are able to cause misconceptions to undergraduate students in high spatial ability scientific knowledge.

Finally, in this paper it is proposed that inserting cartoons (as an agent or supplementary) that employ 3d Visualizations into Higher Education could be a smart technique and strategy to heighten Undergraduate students self-efficacy and motivation which will, in turn, increase and restructure their scientific knowledge. Moreover, undergraduate students will convey less misconceptions about the conceptual nature of chemistry after viewing visualizations of atomic level concepts, strengthen their comprehension and the satisfaction of learning science, which is considered to be a high demanding task to achieve.

Keywords:

3D visualizations, cartoons agents, chemistry, higher education.