Remote Laboratory for enhancing chemistry education: Three cases on design and development of experiments for secondary schools in China

In science/chemistry education, it is well-recognized that laboratory practice or experimental work is an indispensable component of the curricular activities and which is also applicable to STEM education which often involves hands-on activities to integrate with interdisciplinary subject knowledge. However, there are various problems or difficulties such as experimental safety, unavailability/unaffordable of sufficient sets of equipment, lack of laboratory space and time which will simply deprive students of enough opportunities to conduct experiments. As a substitution, teachers often either make live demonstration or ask students to view the virtual experiments or simulations, leading to less ideal educational outcomes. To remedy this deficiency, a low-cost and easy approach is proposed to design and develop remote-controlled (or online) experiments in which students can individually conduct real-time experiments at anywhere and anytime through the Internet using a browser in any computing device. In this presentation, we will report the work by three master degree students who apply this prize-winning approach to tailor-make their own new experiments in different chemistry topics, namely (a) basic experimental methods for investigation of petroleum products (rarely available in schools), (b) to explore the effect of temperature on the rate of color change in the “blue bottle” experiment, and (c) chemical equilibrium in transition metals. Those remote-controlled experiments have undergone pilot implementation in three different secondary schools in Mainland China. We shall share findings obtained from the questionnaire surveys and interviews of the participating students for collecting their feedback, views and problems on their first-person experience in the remote laboratory as well as the personal reflections from those postgraduate developers. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.