DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL REALITY SYSTEM FOR CHEMISTRY LABORATORY

Abstract

Virtual reality has gained interest among academics and other fields due to its various benefits. Virtual reality technology are being improved on the regular basis to fit into the academic systems at all levels, where there are inadequacy of physical laboratories environment for the students to carryout practical. This brought about the development of a Virtual reality system that aids student understanding of chemistry practical. This study present a mathematical model for the titration experiment within the virtual laboratory. The virtual chemistry laboratory environment was designed using Microsoft SQL server for database to enable easy assessment of student performance after the experiment, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was used to create the web page while PHP was used for scripting at the server side, WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) serves as a local server to test the web application on the local machine. The Web browser aided the document retrieval from the server while bootstrap developed the front-end of the web. The developed virtual laboratory system consist of student log-in interface, experiment selection interface, and the titration environment. Consequently, the evaluation of developed virtual chemistry laboratory effectiveness was tested through a structured questionnaire using students as respondent. It performance showed that 60% agreed that it was helpful, easy to interact with (66%) and 54% strongly agree that it improved learning. Hence, virtual reality system could be used to improve understanding of chemistry titration practical.