Purpose
The purpose fo this program is to create a virtual chemistry laboratory to help students who study chemistry for the first year and for their teachers. The program is consistent with the study program in the 7th grade when the students have to study this subject for the first time. If they learn the most important parts of chemistry in this first year they will be able to learn new things more easily after that. So my program aims to help young learners to do this. It can help them to test different reactions and solve different problems. The program can be used both at school and at home.
Development
The program has been created with MS Visual Basic 6, because our school use it and it has a license for it. Visual Basic offers a great opportunity for developing professional projects. All the information used in the program is saved in a database. I use MySQL, because it is free of charge and I have enough experience with it. The project is divided on modules, which do all the program features. As a result of this the program is well optimized and it can be easily updated after that. Graphics in the program are edited with a freeware program, called GIMP.
Existing similar sofware
There are already some online helpers and virtual labs developed in the Internet. But most of them are restricted to visualizing a particular reaction or a separate process and the universal ones are developed for university students of chemistry and are extremely hard to use. What’s more, most of those applications are shareware and require licensing, which is not affordable for most schools and for the average seventh-grader. The project is aimed at a specific group of users, which makes it far better for its purpose than universal laboratories; it has an easy-to-use interface, a help file, a manual and is completely free.
Conclusion
Using this program, students acquire basic skills and knowledge for work in a laboratory without the risk of incidents in a real laboratory. Users have the option to check their skills and knowledge in an unconventional and entertaining way. As far as its further development is concerned, the program has the option for updating its database of the elements and their compounds.