Today there is a digital boom within education, in Sweden all school curricula are re-written where use of digital tools has been added as mandatory in all subject syllabi from the autumn of 2018. This has made teachers, as well as educational researchers, interested to find relevant digital tools where students enhance their learning, not only finding them fun and exciting. In this presentation, the role of technologies as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and gamification is explored to study how students learn chemistry, both regarding affective as well as cognitive aspects of learning [1]. Students’ perceived interest and value are studied using Krapp and Prenzel’s framework of interest [2] and Wenger and colleagues framework of value creation in communities and networks [3]. Part of the interest in VR technology has to do with the availability when a smartphone can be converted to a VR headset at a very low cost. AR technology is much more complicated and expensive, however, the multiple sensory modalities makes it interesting [4]. Gamification in the classroom, where application of game-design in learning processes, has recently attracted a lot of attention [5]. The main aim with gamification is to enhance students’ internal motivation through for example clues and possibilities to “level-up”.
To explore how digital tools influence students learning, we will present two projects. The first is a university organic chemistry course where students practice their spatial competence using VR as a tool to visualise stereochemistry. The students study stereoisomers (for example simple molecules as 2-chlorobutane and more complex stereoisomers as muscarine and nicotine) and we have studied their perceived interest and value of the digital tools using a survey, interviews and observations. In the second project, engineering students have developed a teaching module for upper secondary chemistry using gamification, VR and AR as a way to motivate school students to learn about the protein synthesis. Here, we have conducted a survey and interviews with both the engineering students who developed the module, as well with the school students and teachers who have used the module. In the presentation, possibilities and challenges with the digital tools will be discussed, and examples for practice will be demonstrated.