ChemCAL Online emerged from our early work of the mid 1990s using HyperCard.  It is now a suite of over 1500 ‘pages’ of highly interactive web-based content. ChemCAL is organized into modules around topics that cover the entire first year chemistry syllabus. Many of the pages are multilayered screens where students encounter formative questions in a range of innovative styles, or animations illustrating key chemical ideas and experimental techniques. Our objective has been to enrich and complement all the traditional learning strands in first year chemistry – large lectures, problem classes and laboratory work – with these self-paced tutorials that students draw on to prepare for or to review their learning program. ChemCAL now delivers over 1.3 million pages each year.

The Learning Lab is a world-leader among new learning spaces to support active group and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning, incorporating seamless access to and use of information and presentation technologies. From its launch in February 2007, 1200 chemistry students have been taking classes in the Learning Lab each week. It is now acting as a model for new approaches to tutorial teaching. The Learning Lab is attracting international visitors on a regular basis.

Beyond Multimedia – Back to Reality! is a project to revive and reinvigorate the demonstration lecture – a great tradition in science, but one that has required ’specialist’ theatres.  Built around a mini-DV camera, the set up can be plugged into any theatre video projection system. The close-up capability of modern cameras allows experiments on a micro-scale to be visible in even the largest theatres. Active observation and interpretation of what students can see as it happens can again become a feature of my lectures.

The Chemistry Bytes provides an expanding library of multimedia and video ‘micro’-resources to be used in lectures, tutorials and lab classes. The Animation Bytes draw on the ChemCAL animations ’stripped’ of their explanatory text, so that teachers can use their own explanation in the classroom. The Laboratory Bytes are video clips of laboratory procedures produced at Quicktime movies for use in laboratory classes and in MP4 format for download to individual students’ video iPods.

sNET – The Chemical Laboratory Safety Net is a scenario-based learning environment, for students about to embark on independent research work. Fourteen QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) workplace scenarios are each linked to an active floorplan to help the user locate themselves and their direction of view. Within the QTVRs are embedded over 200 ‘laboratory hazard’ hotspots or ‘hazard control’ hotspots, to be identified and explored as students ‘move’ through the scenarios.

What’s in That? is a 2.5 metre diameter transportable 3D twin-projection environment to engage students from Year 9 to 12 with the invisible but dynamic molecular world. The screen shows a continuously rotating movie of frozen action at a party of young people. As the scene revolves around the room, targets appear … pizza, beer, chocolate, … When a target is ‘hit’ using a Playstation controller, the viewer is transported into the 3D molecular world of that target; the controller joysticks are used to zoom and rotate, while the molecules collide and vibrate through the 3D image.