Developing a Curated Chatbot as an Exploratory Communication Tool for Chemistry Learning

In a technology-centric world, leveraging digital tools such as chatbots allows educators to engage students in ways that may be more accessible for both parties, particularly in large lecture classrooms. This report details the development of an interactive web-based chatbot to curate content for writing about chemistry in context. Students were assigned a 500-word paper where they discuss general chemistry concepts through the lens of a timely, sustainability-related topic, i.e., water footprint, carbon footprint, or embodied carbon. Discussed herein are the development of the decision tree, the chatbot’s components, and results from the initial implementation in a large lecture general chemistry classroom. Over 78% of the 347 enrolled students (271) used the chatbot over 350 times in the 3 weeks leading up to the assigned due date of the paper. Eighty-three percent of the interactions were captured for further analysis, which showed that 22% of students used the chatbot more than once. Forty-six percent of recorded interactions were used to aid students in developing or refining their idea for the assignment. The curated chatbot technology reported here for writing assignments in chemistry can be readily adapted to other aspects of coursework in chemistry.