Middle School Students' Learning through Modeling Chemical Reactions with the Much.Matter.in.Motion Platform (Short Paper)

This research seeks to explore and promote the development of science students’ conceptual understanding of chemical reactions through computational thinking (CT) and modeling practices using the Much.Matter.in.Motion (MMM) platform. According to NGSS standards, chemical reactions should be understood in terms of collisions between molecules resulting in rearrangements of atoms into new molecules. However, many students view chemical processes as a simple connection between molecules rather than an interaction of breaking and forming chemical bonds. To support learning, we designed and developed a learning platform that integrates CT and a complex systems perspective. The MMM enables definingmolecules’ properties, actions, and interactions through block-based coding while emphasizing the existence of collisions, removing, and adding substances. A first round of research with six middle school students was conducted to study the impact of learning to program a variety of chemical reactions on understanding them.Findings demonstrated increases in students' understanding of chemical reactions after learning with integrated CT activities. Students learned about physical and chemical change, collisions between molecules as a condition for a reaction, and reactions as breaking or forming bonds. This paper presents the first round of study with the MMM platform, the analysis of its results, discussion, and conclusions.