Spring 2008 CONFCHEM	Chemistry at the National Science Digital Library An on-line conference, April - June 2008
	Abstracts	Papers	Instructions	Discussion Archive

 

P3: The ChemCollective Digital Library

David Yaron+ (yaron@cmu.edu), Michael Karabinos+, Jodi Davenport#, Gaea Leinhardt*, and James G. Greeno*
+Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
#Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
*Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

The ChemCollective (www.chemcollective.org) is a digital library of activities for introductory college and high school chemistry. The collection includes virtual labs that allow students to design and carry out their own experiments, scenario based learning activities that invite students to apply their knowledge to real world situations, and interactive tutorials that support student problem solving. The digital library supports instructors by providing a portal to the activities, along with user guides and training materials regarding their use. A virtual lab authoring tool allows instructors to modify existing labs or create their own. Of our 85 virtual labs, over 40 were contributed by the community. We are currently working on technologies to allow users to more easily modify, create and contribute to the tutorial collection. Learning studies on materials in the collection are being carried out in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (www.learnlab.org). Our attempts to integrate learning studies with digital libraries, including online collection of data relevant to learning, will be discussed. Community building and support is done both through the web portal and booths and workshops at chemical education conferences. Integration of the collection with the ChemDL and NSDL will also be discussed.

This paper can be found on the author's website at http://www.chemcollective.org/about/paper/confchem08/index.html.

A mirror image of this site is being maintained on the CONFCHEM website, which was downloaded from the author's website on April 18, 2008.