A picture is worth a thousand words: animations and simulations in the teaching of analytical science.

The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is certainly apt when one thinks about the role that animations and simulations can take in the teaching of complex concepts related to the analytical sciences.While traditional approaches such as performing chemical demonstrations and removing the covers from instruments to show their inner workings are still useful, the action embodied in computer animations and simulations make them valuable teaching tools. Fortunately for those of us who are not inclined to code our own visualization routines, there are a large number of high quality freely available electronic resources for use by teachers and students. Many excellent resources are available in annotated form through the Analytical Sciences Digital Library, a collection of peer-reviewed electronic resources freely available at http://www.asdlib.org. This topic was also reviewed by Thomas Chasteen in a recent ACS Symposium series [1]. In thinking about this genre of teaching resources, it is useful to distinguish between animations and simulations. Animations are, in essence, cartoons useful for visualizing a concept that is difficult to fully describe in words. A simulation involves entering parameters into a program to simulate experimental results by calculation. Typically, these resources are stand alone items without accompanying descriptions or instructions. In rare cases, electronic resources, such as the excellent NMR e-text by Joseph Hornak, embed animations as part of the text [2]. Also, increasingly, text book publishers include animations or simulations with their text either as an accompanying CD or through website access [3]. My own experience in using animations and simulations in undergraduate analytical chemistry courses is that just giving the students a url and telling them to “check out this website” is not very effective and seems to have about the same impact as admonishing them to “read the book”. Students often need guidance from the instructor to place the animation or simulation into the context of the course. It is also often necessary to provide instructions about what the student needs to do once they have accessed the website. One way to accomplish this is to provide the students with an assignment to carry out using the web resource that includes a description of the specific learning goals that the animation or simulation should reinforce and a brief tutorial on how to use the program. A formalized example of this approach is the Introduction to Data Analysis learning module by David Harvey and William Otto [4]. This learning module provides a tutorial on uncertainty, comparison of data sets, linear regression, and identifying outliers. The tutorial is supplemented with problems that require students to analyze data sets in ExcelTM spreadsheets provided with the learning module. Although they are also useful for reinforcing concepts addressed in the lecture, assignments using animations and simulations can make especially effective pre-laboratory exercises that can familiarize students with calculations, manipulations, or instrumentation they will use in their experiments. The most effective animations are interactive, actively engaging the student rather than simply adding motion to static pictures. For example, a number of interactive animations written by Thomas Greenbowe, Iowa State Anal Bioanal Chem (2008) 390:71–75 DOI 10.1007/s00216-007-1753-6