Chemisketch: Learning Lewis Dot Diagrams with Pen-Based Editing Interactions and Immediate Feedback

Introductory chemistry courses teach the process of drawing basic chemical molecules with the use of Lewis dot diagrams. However, many beginner students struggle in mastering these diagrams. While there exists educational applications that focus on assisting students in learning Lewis dot diagrams, these applications do not leverage students’ pen-and-paper activities in practicing their usage of Lewis dot diagrams. Furthermore, there exists automated sketch recognition approaches that focus on classifying advanced chemical diagrams, but such approaches focus more on robustly recognizing experts’ completed diagrams and less on assessing novices’ practice diagrams. In this study, we propose an intelligent tutoring system for enabling students to practice constructing Lewis dot diagrams (i.e., constructing, checking, and modifying) with automatic constructive feedback, while allowing them to retain their familiar writing conventions similarly to pen and paper.