From the First-Year Chemistry Laboratory to the International Chemistry Olympiad: A Virtual Experiment Developed from “Chemistry Comes Alive!” Published by JCE

Abstract This paper describes the development of a virtual experiment from the video collection “Chemistry Comes Alive!” published by the Journal of Chemical Education. The original video materials were updated for enhanced accuracy and comprehensiveness. An online quiz with automated grading function was integrated, forming a complete experiment “Properties and Identification of Heavy Metal Ions”. The experiment can assist students in learning descriptive chemistry and related chemical theories, while simultaneously training their skills in observation, data collection, logical reasoning, and qualitative analysis. The experiment has been used in first-year chemistry curricula across multiple universities in China as well as in several national science outreach events. In particular, a problem derived from the experiment served as the first virtual practical problem in the history of the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO 2022).