Teaching Molecules How to React: Middle School Students’ Learning through Computational Modeling of Chemical Reactions Using M.M.M Platform

The particulate model of matter is a foundational idea that describes and explains many phenomena in chemistry and physics. However, chemical reactions are usually taught as a detached event, disregarding the multiple interactions between molecules, the dynamic nature of the process, and the underlying mechanism. Thus, many students think that substances are joined together, modified, or transformed into products in a one-step process. To this goal, we designed and developed the MMM-React, based on a framework that supports computational modeling with a complex systems perspective. It enables the construction of a variety of models in chemistry and physics with a small set of computational blocks, making a clear separation between properties, actions, and interactions of different kinds of entities. The study uses mixed methods with 60 middle-school students in a pretest-intervention-posttest design. Findings demonstrated a significant increase in students' conceptual understanding, specifically in concepts related to micro-level, the particulate model, and in system components related to emergence. Analysis of students’ discourse during interacting with MMM-React shows how the design of the separate computational blocks supported in viewing chemical reactions as parallel events occurring among many molecules with the necessary condition of collisions, after which breaking and forming bonds occur.