Smart Phones, a Powerful Tool in the Chemistry Classroom

Cell phones, especially “smartphones” (see note), are being widely used by students. It is misleading to call many of these devices phones, since they are actually a portable and powerful computer that can be valuable in the chemistry classroom. Currently, there are three major ways in which smartphones can be used for education. Smartphones include a web browser, which gives access to the wealth of material on the World Wide Web (WWW), inexpensive applications (commonly called apps) expand this usefulness even further, and two-dimensional barcode labels can be used to create "smart objects." Taken together, these capabilities are creating a world of mobile computing whose impact on society, including chemical education, may be even greater than the changes brought about by the personal computer.