Trends in Digital Education: Selected papers from EC-TEL 2015 Workshops CHANGEE, WAPLA, and HybridEd 23 Putting Theory into Practice with Technology in Chemistry Education Shaykhah S. Aldosari 1,2 and Davide Marocco 2 1 College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman Univesity, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ssaldossary@pnu.edu.sa 2 School of Computing, Electronic and Mathematics, Plymouth University, Plymouth, United Kingdom {shaykhah.aldosari, davide.marocco}@plymouth.ac.uk Abstract. In recent years the field of alternative haptic interface is expanding and improvements are being made by developing, testing and refining devices along with software to give users the possibility of inter- acting with three di- mensional virtual objects in an intuitive way. Such technology can play a signif- icant role in education, especially as complements of MOOCs delivery. This paper presents a description of an educational haptic system for chemistry ex- periment simulations and molecular visualization that can complement a virtual delivery system by providing hands-on experiences. It also describes some di- dactic scenarios and discusses current results and future works. Keywords: Haptics, haptic interface, technology enhanced learning, chemistry education, e-learning, simulation, molecular visualization. 1 Introduction In recent years, the evolution of technology has influenced education in several ways. Various tools and methods based on visual interaction technologies have been introduced that help students to acquire knowledge through simulation. It has been realized that virtual visualization could solve the difficulty in under- standing certain aspects of the real world and help learners to fully grasp the idea behind scientific rules and laws or other subjects rather than just having theoretical knowledge [1]. There is a general consensus on two different approaches to learning. One is pas- sive learning, in which students are asked to sit and understand the theories through visual and auditory cues. This way of learning can be boring for the students and di- verts their attention after some time. On the other hand, active learning is a means of learning in which the students are directly involved. They have control over learning, they explore a concept, and they expand their energies to make decisions. This meth- od of learning is recognized to develop the interest of the students and motivates them to explore and learn more [2]. A recent research has found that the use of acoustic and visual presentation tech- niques works exceptionally well in educational domains. In 1996, [3] shows that dis-