Mastering MarvinJS - Drawing tool for Mastering Chemistry

Learning organic chemistry is one of the most challenging tasks an undergraduate can choose to face. Professors typically expect students to work through the problems in their textbook and assess their own strengths and weaknesses - most of the time without additional guidance other than the option to visit them in office hours. Unfortunately, most instructors indicate that less than 10% of students ever come to see them outside of class and most don't actually grade any homework. This provides a tremendous opportunity to give students practice working through problems with guided feedback to help them learn how reactions proceed using an online system. It is not, however, without challenges. We will discuss our implementation of a drawing tool powered by ChemAxon, how it grades mechanism and synthesis problems as well as some of the forward-thinking innovations we hope to implement to make it more useful to students and faculty.

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