Students undertaking courses in the field of chemistry need to integrate their spatial skills and conceptual knowledge. However, model perception along with the understanding of spatial processes and spatial structures of molecules has been a cause of difficulty for students as conventional teaching methods cannot fully aid student comprehension. In this research, we propose a technological solution to aid the spatial learning process by automatically creating a link between two-dimensional (2D) representations of chemical structures and three-dimensional (3D) molecular visualization. The image of a chemical structure is acquired and processed on-the-fly for structure identification and 3D model generation. The 3D molecular model is simplified for real-time interactive rendering. The efficacy of the proposed solution in enhancing spatial ability of individuals is evaluated through an experiment on first year undergraduate students. Our analysis of the results suggests that virtual models and mobile applications are capable of narrowing the performance gap between students with different levels of spatial ability.

中文翻译：

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文本中嵌入的化学结构图的交互式3D可视化，以帮助学生进行空间学习

修读化学领域课程的学生需要整合他们的空间技能和概念知识。然而，模型感知以及对分子的空间过程和空间结构的理解已经成为学生的难题，因为传统的教学方法不能完全帮助学生理解。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种技术解决方案，可通过自动在化学结构的二维（2D）表示与三维（3D）分子可视化之间创建链接来辅助空间学习过程。获取化学结构的图像并即时对其进行处理，以进行结构识别和3D模型生成。简化了3D分子模型以进行实时交互式渲染。通过对一年级本科生的实验，评估了所提出的解决方案在增强个人空间能力方面的功效。我们对结果的分析表明，虚拟模型和移动应用程序能够缩小具有不同水平空间能力的学生之间的表现差距。