Abstract

Before attending any laboratory courses, students are required to learn about the safety issues and potential chemical and health hazards. However, students are often bored and cannot remain focused in a safety training session through the traditional one-way lecture teaching style. Students have low awareness of the importance of the laboratory safety. Owing to have the same Chemistry theme in the key foundation courses, this proposed project will be a collaboration between the Chemistry Department and the School of Pharmacy, and aim to develop an effective and interactive teaching method for laboratory safety training sessions with the assistance of modern teaching technology in order to enhance students’ safety awareness and provide the necessary knowledge of the hazards associated with different chemicals and the proper steps for protecting themselves in the lab. The designed interactive learning platform will be accessible by students from both departments, which can be considered as a cost-effective development.

Through a gamification teaching and learning approach, the increased incentive of learning under a more interactive atmosphere is expected to facilitate the training of their problem-solving. Furthermore, the provided safety videos/animations, simulations and interactive gamification website will also attract student interests outside the traditional classroom. This project will serve as a “kickstarter” project for our future development on the virtual undergraduate laboratory courses to provide training for all basic laboratory skills in order to assist them in experiential learning courses.