Chemistry, and theoretical chemistry in particular, is unable to shake the reputation of being hard to learn [1]. But why is that? One reason is the imperceptibility and intangibility of many salient concepts in the discipline. Students always relate new information to prior experiences, and this becomes harder if there is no immediate connection to the world that they interact with every day [2]. However, teachers and lecturers can create these connections by offering bridging representations that bring the imperceptible concepts to the world of the students [3].

Here, we will present the case of a real-time quantum chemistry simulation that offered haptic feedback to bachelor students [4]. While we expected that, aligned with the reasoning above, the haptic feedback will allow the students to feel forces that normally are inaccessible to them, we found that the students who did not receive such feedback outperformed the ones who did [5, 6]. We will discuss the reasons for this result and offer some lessons that we learned in the process. 

References

[1] Johnstone, J. Comput. Assist. Learn. 1991, 7, 75-83.
[2] Niebert, Gropengiesser, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2015, 37, 903-933
[3] Pham, Tytler, Res. Sci. Educ. 2022, 52, 853-869.
[4] Müller et al., J. Phys. Chem. A. 2024, 128, 9028-9044.
[5] Müller, Reiher, Kapur, J. Comput. Assist. Learn. 2024, 40, 715-730.
[6] Müller, Reiher, Kapur, ISLS 2024. 2024, 1043-1046.