For Students
If you’re here to interact with the chatbot for your course, please follow the pertinent link below.
- Here is where Chem1600 students can find the Fall 2025 chatbot for the final SOCME project on food production and food waste
- For Chem 1600 food production and food waste chatbot, click here
- Here's a list of older chatbots if you are curious about other ways they might be used.
- For Chem 1770, Dr. Holme has several older chatbot pages.
- If you wish to see the syllabus chatbot page, click here
- If you wish to see the concept map chatbot page, click here
- If you wish to see the carbon and water footprint chatbot page, click here
- For Chem 160 with Dr. Holme, click here
- For Chem 167 with Dr. Bonaccorsi, click here
- For Chem 178L with Dr. Pistolesi, click here
- For Chem 333L with Dr. Fernando, click here
If you are here to see an example of a curated chatbot, please click here for a preview of the chatbot. This particular chatbot was curated to connect context to chemistry in large lecture sections, and this demonstration focused primarily on carbon capture technology.
Philosophy for chatbot development
The use of chatbots in large lectures sections addresses two key points:
- Provide tailored information and access to information and resources that students can access at any point, and
- Give the educator insight on how students are approaching and contextualizing chemistry
For interested educators
Interested in creating a chatbot? Here are some guidelines to consider in crafting the chatbot.
1. What information do you have available to map out a decision tree?
These could include commonly asked questions about your teaching experience, the resources you use, and the information you want students to interact with, or areas of concern that your students might gravitate towards. When first plotting out the decision tree, consider the types of questions that have a direct response (or multiple). Additionally, not everything has to be written altogether – a chatbot can have multiple speech bubbles in response to a prompt, so you can bring a couple of different (but related) answers if needed.
2. As you begin to map out your decision tree, consider what broad questions your students might ask.
This can determine how you start your chatbot and define how deep the chatbot may go into details. For example, you can map out guideposts in your chatbot by asking, “Would you like to see the ways I could help you?” for folks who may be unsure what their questions are or what ways the chatbot can be useful to them. They can then walk through each interaction in the chatbot as if it were a guide. For those who want more freedom and flexibility, chatbots can be programmed to accept free-text prompts that activate specific modules.
3. Beyond “yes/no” responses, what are some ways to encourage exploring or self-assessment that you might incorporate in the chatbot?
While the chatbot can mimic conversational interactions based on what you write up for the chatbot, it may not be able to answer students’ specific concerns. That’s not a deterrent! The chatbot can allow some flexibility in answering more broadly and giving students an opportunity to consider their specific situation. For example, students trying to understand if they’re on the right track for a writing prompt, the initial purpose of the chatbots created here, broad questions like:
- Does your idea include a way to talk about chemistry?
- Does your idea include a discussion about sustainability?
- Are you focused on the main topic of the semester (e.g., water footprint)?
You can add conditional responses tailored to students' answers, guiding them to information that addresses their specific needs.
4. Pick a platform that works best for your situation.
There are quite a few options for developing a chatbot and employing it in your classroom. For the sake of our research, we chose IBM Cloud’s Virtual Assistant as it was web and text-based. We could pull the exact interactions students had with the chatbot, and you can develop a single instance of a chatbot for free. For those who use the Microsoft suite at the institution, you may be able to use Microsoft Virtual Power Assistant.
5. Map out your decision tree, and test!
To see a chemistry education chatbot in action... Check out a preview here