A virtual chemistry laboratory that can lead to the road of innovation -By Sharal Deegoju from VJTI Mumbai

If you are a Chemistry lover and day in, day out you adore the beauty of the reactions, then this article on an ingenious idea of a virtual Chemistry laboratory will astonish you. Let’s dig into Sharal’s idea.

In the early 1900s, if you wanted to be a US Air Corps pilot, you’d easily call the selection process, awkward. You, a prospective student, would be accompanied by a professional pilot into one of the US Air Corps planes. He’d spin, loop and whizz the plane crazily and if you weren’t puking by the end of the flight then you’d be considered fit for a few weeks of rigorous flying tutorials before you could take to air. You would be taught set patterns – what to do and what not to – to become a professional pilot. You would be instructed not to tinker much with this process unless you did not fear death.

The liberating power of simulation

Fast forward to the modern-day, what chemistry lacks and air pilots do have, is a simulation. Pilots now have the freedom to experiment hands-on with simulators, experience a variety of situations and realize what’s best done at what time. It’s no more fixed patterns of learning. The end result is more experienced and more aware pilots who knows the whys and hows of manoeuvring.

As a chemistry lover, I think that it’s a shame that we still measure proportions and only react set chemicals provided to us in labs at school and college. Chemistry is an ever-evolving branch of science. It is a creative subject, having no boundaries or limits. The world around us, our luxuries and necessities, and the rest, function on the basis of inter-disciplinary understanding of various subjects of science, and chemistry allows for max innovation in designing various syntheses for human betterment.

The need to step-up a notch

All beautiful things have a ‘however’ packaged along with them. The same goes for Chemistry. However, only the top chemistry scientists or professionals can get their hands onto chemicals, lab settings, and all the other professional equipment required to conduct an experiment or carry out a reaction. This scenario, I feel, is dangerous for chemistry as a subject. The number of unknowns in chemistry is huge and thus there is ample scope for research and exploration, and much of it starts in a lab where one can get hands-on experience. The set patterns used in schools and colleges also work brilliantly in hurting the learning of chemistry.

Even the experience at a Chemistry laboratory can get pretty tedious. You need to have the right equipment; you need to have sufficient knowledge before carrying out reactions, for mishaps are not strange to chemistry laboratories. This entire process stems the way a subject is discovered by a student. Safety measures that need to be followed are necessary, not hyped, but can be wearying. The experimentation and production of more chemical reagents and materials are hindered by the number of prerequisites.

Note: Every Chemistry laboratory you will come across in life has that one legendary accident or explosion the instructor will always warn you of, at the start of your lab course: don’t laugh even if it’s funny.

Make mistakes, learn and grow

The need of the hour is a virtual Chemistry laboratory where one can just pour any random reagent into another and see what happens. In reality, this is not to be, because mistakes can prove to be costly, you may read it as fatal too. Making mistakes, which is, in fact, a novel and more efficient way to learn a subject cannot be encouraged in real environments, but the evolution of technology now gives us a chance to learn this way, artificially.

‘Learn Chemistry by making mistakes’ - this sounds bawse to me!

A feast to Chemistry enthusiasts

Such an application would be difficult to be realized, but it is not impossible with the massive in-roads we are making into education with technology. This ideal application would have a wide range of chemicals available, in all sorts of quantities. Designing the outcomes of the range of chemical reactions could be difficult to arrive at, but slowly and steadily we could end up with an amazing result. 

We could make this as an open-source and have an entire community of chemistry enthusiasts who could contribute to this application’s growth, predicting results of a variety of reactions, catering to a range of subjects from Biomedicine, Electrochemistry, and Nanoscience to Organic Chemistry, Material Science and Green Chemistry, and so on. Who knows, in this pursuit of finding results of reactions while creating this app, we might end up discovering new chemicals! This way chemistry can reach everybody and make it a really democratic subject.

‘The Power of Chemistry, to all.’ - this again is highly bawse! 

This article was submitted as an entry to TechSpeak- You Innovate, We Narrate!