Analogue Three-Dimensional Memory Game for Teaching Reflection, Symmetry, and Chirality to High School Students

Abstract

This interdisciplinary analogue 3D Memory Game is a version of a card-based memory game, developed to encourage high school students to use deductive reasoning skills and to understand reflection (mirror images), symmetry, and chirality. Instead of cards, three-dimensional pieces are used in order to facilitate the understanding of the spatial arrangement of things, both geometric objects and organic compounds. Correlating geometric objects with the simple molecular model representation of organic compounds, the game promotes knowledge transposition to spatial recognition of chemical structures and chirality in formal education, classrooms, or nonformal educational settings (e.g., a science center or discovery center or university outreach setting). The game was used in 2016 in a classroom with 16 students in a high school in Sao Goncalo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as at a science fair in 2015. The game lasts 15–25 min when played by 5 or 3 groups of 2 students, respectively. On the basis of the feed...