Tap It Fast! Playing a Molecular Symmetry Game for Practice and Formative Assessment of Students’ Understanding of Symmetry Concepts

摘要

Nowadays, there is a lot?of discussion regarding teaching methods, their characteristics and potential, as well as their limitations. Aiming to encourage new methodologies for the teaching of chemistry in higher education, a novel didactic game was developed and applied in order to provide parallel support to undergraduate chemistry students learning about molecular symmetry. This educational resource was well-accepted by the students and was found to be a ludic evaluation tool for the study of symmetry. The game was applied to undergraduate chemistry sophomores and was found to be a powerful tool to improve students’ skills in several topics, including molecular geometry, spatial molecular projections, and electronic and vibrational spectroscopy. During the activities, students participated by sharing their doubts about the presence of symmetry. In this paper, we report and discuss the results of the experimental use of this new resource developed for the teaching of molecular symmetry.