Sara K Madsen

Dow Green Chemistry Education Award Winner 2022-2023 

Institution: South Dakota State University (SDSU)
Faculty Lead: Sara K. Madsen
Project Description: Virtual Reality (VR) will be used to assess its learning effectiveness in Organic Chemistry laboratory that currently uses green chemistry pedagogy. The goal of this project is to use VR to provide chemistry students an opportunity to practice green chemistry techniques and experiments before entering a real space laboratory. SDSU faculty, staff, and administrators, SDSU students, and South Dakota Tribal Colleges will benefit from this project. This project will design a VR template that can achieve the following objectives:

• Practice the procedures of a traditional green experiment and non-green experiment and assess learning in VR.
• Conduct a green experiment and non-green experiment in the real laboratory space and assess learning, calculate energy consumption, atom economy and E-Factor, in both VR and non-VR spaces.
• Modify VR objects to optimize and pilot the green chemistry experiment in VR.